


Satin in a Coffin

by Crait



Series: Stark Disassembled [3]
Category: Avengers (Comics), Iron Man (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Body Horror, Depression, Extremis (Marvel), Internalized Homophobia, Iron Man Vol. 4 (2005), Iron Man: Director of SHIELD, Kitchen Sink Continuity, M/M, Pining, Self-Hatred, Tony Stark's Life Has Hit Rock Bottom, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:42:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26367376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crait/pseuds/Crait
Summary: Careful. It's so heavy only I can lift it.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Stark Disassembled [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921303
Comments: 18
Kudos: 42





	Satin in a Coffin

**Author's Note:**

> **Please take the warnings on this installment seriously.** The suicidal ideation found here is explicit and contains detailed fantasizing about self-harm. This part also deals briefly with internalized homophobia. There is a scene containing discussion of rape (between characters who are fictional within the story) and another scene described using imagery that echoes sexual assault. The usual warnings also apply: character death (nobody new in this part, just a lot of fallout), body horror, alcoholism and other mental health issues, and implications of child abuse. 
> 
> SF all too frequently draws a straight line from the use of augmentative technology to a loss of humanity, which is an ableist narrative. Please know that the issue here is that Tony is an unreliable narrator who is mentally ill, who is prone to addictive behaviors and self-injury, and who tries to use adaptive technologies as an unhealthy coping mechanism of the "I hate myself so I'm going to unmake myself" variety. More on that in future installments.
> 
> Disclaimer: the sci-fi science in this is terrible because I am terrible at science. Insert Marge Simpson: "I just think it's neat!"
> 
> All of the thanks in the universe to Nigmuff for the best beta work and Kiyaar for the best encouragement. You guys rock, and this third part never would've happened if not for your enthusiasm for the series!! Can you believe it's going to have a happy ending someday?
> 
> And as always, this story is formatted with a custom skin. The summary comes from Invincible Iron Man (2008) #21, and the title from the [Modest Mouse song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEPviNo1tjc) of the same name:
> 
> You were laying on the carpet  
> Like you're satin in a coffin.  
> You said, "Do you believe what you're saying?"  
> Yeah, right now, but not that often.
> 
> Are you dead or are you sleeping?  
> Are you dead or are you sleeping?  
> Are you dead or are you sleeping?  
> God I sure hope you are dead.

* * *

Eventually, Tony thinks of everything. He thought of this: he thought of this exact outcome, under these conditions, he thought of how the bullet might look as it caught Steve in the sternum, he thought of how Steve would jerk and slump, his great heart still working, still pumping blood out the profane hole punched in his chest. Tony thought of that. He thinks of it often, in color and stereo. He thinks of it so often it's frozen on the backs of his eyelids, a ghost image on a faulty screen.

"You knew this was coming," Steve says. "Don't you call yourself a futurist?"

Tony, who is folded within the Iron Man, which is itself folded into the suite of rooms that once housed the Avengers, doesn't reply. What can he say to that? There's nothing he can say that Steve doesn't know already. They know each other too well. It's a sign of Tony's own deficiency that even a fathomless understanding can't span the void between them. 

Thirty-three days ago, Tony poured a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black down the sink in the kitchen behind him. He didn't drink any of it, not even when a single gleaming drop fell from the mouth of the empty bottle and ran down the curve of his thumb. The seal on his armor is impenetrable, maintaining a complete artificial atmosphere in its confines. Iron Man is its own world, a bubble set apart from the rest of the universe, an absolute division between what is without and what is within. Despite that, Tony can smell whisky on the back of his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

"You didn't think it through, Tony," Steve continues. He's relentless in the slow way of massive things. With a long enough lever, Tony could use his shoulders to move mountains.

"I think everything through," Tony says. It's soft, a whisper of air within the confines of his helmet. Maybe it doesn't reach past his ears. Maybe he's talking to himself.

Steve draws up beside him. Tony can just see him in periphery: his strong, straight nose, his fine eyelashes, the stern line of a mouth made more generous by familiarity. He's wearing the union suit, but his face is bare.

"Maybe that's the problem," Steve says. "You think too much."

"Am I lean and hungry?" Tony wonders.

"You're dangerous," Steve assents. "That isn't a judgment, Tony. It's a fact. We both know it."

Tony can just see Steve's reflection in the glass, his face given a golden glow from the lights shining through the window. New York is always so bright; it's a wonder there's room for shadow. Like this, with Tony in the armor and Steve in his boots, Tony is demonstrably taller than Steve. It's the only time he's able to look down on Cap for anything.

"Do you remember when you were drinking?"

"Yes," Tony says. It's pulled out of him. He didn't choose to say it.

"Do you remember," Steve says—soft, glacial, inexorable— "Do you remember when you sat down in the snow and waited to die?"

"Yes," Tony says again.

"Why was that?"

"Because it was better than being Tony Stark for one more day."

"Because it was better than being Tony Stark for one more day," Steve echoes. "So you sat down in the snow to die." A pause. He continues gently, so gently: "It's a shame it didn't take, isn't it?"

"Yes," Tony says, because it is a shame, it is undeniable. It is obvious. It's the truth.

* * *

People fall in love because they understand that passion shores up the holes that reason can't patch. They fall in love because they're lonely, because they don't want to be lonely, and because they don't have any choice. Sometimes they fall in love because they want to fall in love. Tony wonders at that kind of freedom.

In one world, Tony falls in love easily. He loves Cancun, he loves his Porsche, he loves seeing his company sit at the top of the stock exchange. He loves every woman he ever dates, every woman he ever fucks. He doesn't fall in love with any men—not because he's avoiding complications, but because here he isn't built that way. He falls in love with Bethany Cabe, with Whitney Frost, with Sunset Bain, and they fall in love with him back, and nobody leaves anybody until Tony falls in love with the next woman. He falls in love with Jan and Natasha, Emma and Pepper. He falls in love with them twice on the same day. He falls out of love and back into it like a gull diving down to skim the surface of the ocean.

In another world, Tony is fucked. He falls in love hard and fast. He falls in love because he doesn't have any choice. He feels a deep well of romantic affection for a number of people, some of whom don't even shoot him in the spine before they abandon ship; but his love is packed away somewhere internal, in a hollow cavity no one can touch, and he uses lovers like scalpels to carve a path to that void. He falls in love because he doesn't have a choice, and like a boat that can only carry so much weight before it sinks, he falls in love once in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and thereafter only when he can safely compensate for the additional ballast. He falls in love with his armor; he falls out of love with himself. He falls in love with Steve Rogers and binds that love to an anchor and drops it deep where it will never be found. He falls in love but never out of love. He is anchored still.

Tony doesn't fall in love because he wants to fall in love. Tony falls in love because he doesn't have a choice. He loves Steve quietly, faithfully, because it's one of those disgraceful qualities he can't figure out how to cut out of himself. He loves Steve even when it hurts. The hurt is how he knows it's worthwhile. Pain is the only currency the universe understands. For Steve Rogers, Tony has paid dearly.

* * *

He's on the bridge when he gets the call. The Registration Division helicarrier is parked over Omaha, Nebraska, for reasons that on some level make sense to Tony and on another level render him incredulous. Intellectually, he's aware that New York isn't the center of the universe, but he still believes in his gut with all the faith of a born-and-bred New Yorker that other places, especially in flyover country, are inconsequential. 

It isn't a flattering thought, but very few of Tony's thoughts are flattering of late.

"Boss," Friday whispers in his ear. "Incoming call for you. It's Timothy Dugan. Private channel." Which makes it the sort of call that Tony previously would have taken in his office, later would have taken in his armor with the external speakers turned off. Now he doesn't bother. Now his brain receives the signal, decrypts it, passes back an audible response without Tony ever having to move his lips. Why waste time translating speech into signal when you can manufacture the signal and skip the first step?

 _"Stark,"_ Dugan says. 

"Dugan," Tony says. He respects Dugan, but they aren't _buddies._ Tony used to have buddies and then one of them got shot in the head and the other got shot in the heart and the only guy remaining fucked off to Camp Hammond because Tony decided cutting Rhodey out of his life was the cleanest, the simplest, and by some measure the best choice. 

_"This is a courtesy call,"_ Dugan says. _"Kooning will be in touch any minute. Or hell, maybe someone higher up,"_ which meant the president. _"Hill is MIA. They're appointing you director."_

"Okay," Tony says. He's numb to it. Nothing can shock him anymore; this might as well happen. "Any idea where Hill went?"

Dugan's voice draws a grim line. _"Nothing. Maybe Fury's alive, or maybe she was killed or kidnapped, or maybe she's on vacation in the Bahamas and this is the only way she thought she could get a little R &R."_

"Any idea why me?" There are half a dozen more obvious or better qualified choices. Dum Dum's not even the lowest on that list.

 _"Not one fuckin' clue,"_ Dugan says. _"You figure it out, let me know."_

"Thanks, Commander," Tony says. "I'll be in touch." The line goes dead before Tony can end it. A flat second later, it chimes again.

"Secretary Jack Kooning," Friday murmurs. Well. That was quick. "Ready, boss?"

"Go," Tony says, and then, once the line is open: "Mister Secretary."

 _"Tony,"_ says the Secretary of Defense. _"How's it going up there?"_

Tony looks past the people, past the banks of electronics, straight out to a view without a horizon. They're parked six miles above Omaha, and it's clear skies as far as a transhuman eye can see. Tony blinks over to infrared, blinks again to summon an overlay that tells him the names, ages, and security ratings of every SHIELD agent on the bridge. The overlay isn't on his HUD. He could take off his helmet and the same bright web of lines would be drawn not over his eyes but his nerves. Some day he won't need the armor because he will be the armor.

"Business as usual," he says, because even SHIELD is an industry. "Something I can help you with, sir?"

Jack Kooning heaves a sigh that indicates he's carrying the weight of the world, that he acts solemnly and according to duty, that he doesn't want to deliver the heavy burden of news but knows he must. _"Have you heard about Hill?"_

"What about her?" Tony plays dumb. Whatever happened to Hill happened recently enough that Dugan just got wind of it.

_"Tony."_

"I heard she's MIA," he says. "Nothing more than that. Nothing confirmed."

 _"I'm confirming,"_ Jack says. _"I can't say more, it's all need-to-know, except that we're appointing you acting Director of SHIELD."_ He pauses. _"Effective immediately."_

"Yes, sir," Tony says, as wooden now as he wasn't before Captain America's death thirty-four days ago.

_"We're recalling you to D.C. Bring your helicarrier home, we'll put you in Fury's old flagship, get you up to speed."_

"No, sir," Tony says.

_"...Excuse me?"_

"With all due respect"—Tony works weights and measures in his head, discards the formal for something a little more personal and earnest—"with all due respect, Jack, you didn't have the power to recall me even before you appointed me director."

_"Not an order, Tony, just a… friendly suggestion. There's going to be a ceremony to swear you in."_

"Send me the time and place. I need a half-hour lead."

In the pause that follows, he can hear Jack's train of thought: _Nebraska to the east coast, in thirty minutes._ _"You're flying back yourself,"_ Jack says, which means he knows that Tony's coming alone, in the armor, without the helicarrier.

"Yes, sir," Tony says.

_"May I ask why?"_

"That's need-to-know." Once upon a time, Tony would have said it flippantly. Arrogantly. With a tone intended to push buttons. Now, it's a flat fact. Wooden, even: matte. No light is reflected.

 _"Tony,"_ Jack says, with the sort of mildly friendly warning that only comes from years of political ass-kissing, _"you might want to remember that your position is currently a probationary appointment."_

"I didn't ask for this job." Just the facts, sir. 

_"Didn't you?"_ says Kooning. _"I'll be in touch."_ He hangs up without offering Tony time enough to compose a rebuttal. Maybe Tony did ask for it; maybe he's been asking for it all along. Steve always said that Tony was awful at looking out for himself.

What's going on six miles beneath Tony's feet is that three of the local peacekeepers (that's the SRA's term) have gone missing. Not at the same time; Captain Ultra vanished four weeks ago, Gadget a week after that, Paragon two days later. Gadget wandered back into the local police station barefoot and drugged out of her mind thirty hours after she disappeared and apparently retained no memory of what had happened to her. The other two have yet to turn up. Tony figures they're dead and buried in a cornfield. But there's a pattern here—

That's his problem: he's always looking for patterns in what others take as random noise. Steve used to say that Tony had good intuition. What Steve didn't understand is that Tony's intuition is really just an ability to assemble environmental data collected by his subconscious into a coherent idea. It isn't art, just engineering. Tony is here in Nebraska for intuitive reasons; that his mind has yet to fully reveal the mechanisms of that reasoning is a flaw in Tony himself. It's fine. He's a work in progress. Steve used to say that art was never finished, only abandoned, but Tony isn't a work of art. Someday Tony will be transcendent, perfected, sure of himself and free from sin. Tony Stark 3.0 is on the horizon, a being so flawless that no one will ever abandon it again.

Steve used to say a lot of things. He can't anymore, because he's dead, but if he were here, he'd say—he'd say—

"Why are they so hellbent on making you director?" he'd say.

"Because you turned them down, handsome," Tony would answer, and he'd bat his eyelashes a couple of times to see if he could make Cap flush or laugh. Steve always seemed to take Tony's flirting as a joke, and Tony went along with it, the refuge making him more brazen than he would've been otherwise. If Steve had understood that the flirting wasn't a joke, Tony would never have flirted with him again.

"Because something's changed," Steve would correct, and Tony would lean his hip against his workbench and marvel at how the air felt on his open, exposed skin. There'd be only a thin shirt between him and the rest of the world, and Steve wouldn't have looked at Tony like Tony deserved to die, and Tony would never have begged him to finish it, because Tony wouldn't have been selfish enough to believe he deserved an escape from the consequences of his own actions. It's the most pointless, the most unprofitable, and the most painful kind of What If: the What Could Have Been. Except who is Tony kidding, they were always going to end up here, and there was never a world in which Steve would've looked at Tony in the way Tony wanted. It's the worst kind of What If. It's the kind that crawls out of people who try to pack their hollow insides with mimicries of feeling. Tony knows what he is. Eventually, his self-knowledge will be perfect.

"Boss?" Friday whispers. She's always in his ear, a better conscience than he deserves. 

"The CSA could call me off," he says.

"Do you want me to look?"

"No," Tony says. "It's fine. They won't force the issue."

"Because they don't need to."

"Because they don't need to," Tony agrees.

* * *

BOWMAN: Eight isn't enough.

DAEDALUS: No. It's slow going, although compared to what you would encounter under less permissive circumstances—

BOWMAN: I'm aware.

DAEDALUS: There's always the garden variety.

BOWMAN: That's the next stage. When I can consistently achieve more stable results, we'll broaden our criteria.

DAEDALUS: What are you working on?

BOWMAN: A side project.

DAEDALUS: Really? I didn't know you were capable of it.

BOWMAN: I'm not as single-minded as everyone believes me to be. Anyway, this is a favor for the guy at the other end of the leash.

DAEDALUS: If you say so.

BOWMAN: [ _indistinct_ ]

DAEDALUS: It looks like jewelry.

BOWMAN: You should know better. Leave me alone now. This is harder than I make it look.

DAEDALUS: Everything is harder than you make it look.

* * *

"So that happened."

They're doing really well, the both of them. Tony isn't drinking and Carol isn't drinking and maybe that's part of why Tony doesn't take his helmet off anymore. He'd made repairs, after Steve had tried to cave his face in; the new helmet is reinforced, rebuilt, reborn to be something better. Or at least something less likely to shatter when an opponent drives the edge of a twelve-pound vibranium-alloy disc into his head to crack his shell and drag his soft body out for all the world to see. They're doing really well. Carol isn't drinking, and Tony isn't drinking, and if they're staring at each other with the sort of vacant grief that suggests neither of them have slept in six days, it's fine, because they're doing really well, because they aren't drinking. Tony doesn't need to sleep anymore anyway. Almost doesn't need to sleep. He sleeps very little; he never needs more.

"I'm making you head of R&D," Tony says.

"Yeah. I figured." 

Carol and Tony are within spitting distance of the same height—one of them a hair over six feet, one of them a hair under. The added height of the armor does nothing to remove that equity.

"How's..."

"He's pissed that you won't call him back," Carol says, "how do you think he is?" She inhales, sucking air through her teeth, and then exhales, long and weighty. "I get it. I remember having the energy to care about people, but now…" 

"But now," Tony agrees.

"I barely talk to James more than you do," Carol says. "Tracy isn't talking to me. My best friend is a fugitive who wouldn't spit on me if I were on fire."

Tony was never _close_ to Jessica Drew. They were friendly, but most of what he knows about her is filtered through Carol, and therefore he has been made aware that Drew is the funniest, the toughest, and the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet.

Carol's dad had been a hardass. He was an alcoholic (weren't all fathers alcoholics?) and a traditionalist, the kind of man who refused to pay for his bright, brilliant daughter to go to college because he thought the money would be better spent on one of her brothers. 

He was traditional. He was conservative. Carol understands the mindset. And part of Tony, part of Tony has always wondered if this might be one more way in which he and Carol are the same—

"You and Drew," he says. "Did the two of you ever…" 

Carol throws him a sharp glance, checking if he's making the sort of lascivious joke people would expect of the Tony Stark who smirked at the world from the front of the newspaper. No, that gives her too little credit; Carol knows him. Her offense has older roots.

"Did we ever what?" she says, and her tone is even sharper than her glance, it's granite, it's glacial. "She's my best friend. We aren't like _that."_

Tony knows how this one goes. He's seen Carol with Rhodey, knows that before Steve Rogers got shot in the heart there might have been the potential there for something strong and satisfying and lasting. He'd just never been sure that Carol wouldn't have dropped everything and raced to throw herself at Drew's feet should Drew ever decide to exercise the option. Maybe Carol has a love like an anchor. Maybe she is anchored still. He wonders if she ever hated herself for being unable to cut the chain.

"This conversation is over," Carol says, her tone now the whip-crack of a woman who gave her dad the middle finger, joined the Air Force to pay for her own education, and ended up a full-bird colonel, a security chief for NASA, a bestselling author, an intergalactic adventurer, and one of Earth's mightiest heroes all before the age of forty. 

What he wants to ask Carol is if she ever looked at Drew and felt shame.

He has to be better than this. "I'm going down to liaise with the Omaha Police Department, maybe interview the survivor. It shouldn't take long."

"Small job for the Director of SHIELD," Carol says neutrally. She's right; although Fury, and Hill after him, had paid attention to any number of minor affairs that later had far-reaching consequences, they both know that Tony's here on a hunch. He'd met Griffin Gogol before, but only briefly, and there was nothing about Captain Ultra's powerset that suggested he'd be easy to kidnap. A flying brick disappearing usually meant some greater power working behind the curtain: hypnosis, a doppelganger, mind-control—or a being powerful enough to overcome a superpower. It's the kind of data point that others would take as isolated while Tony built towers around that small, singular particle.

"We'll head back to D.C. when we're finished," Tony says. "They'll swear me in, maybe during a U.N. assembly, and I'll give you the keys to this cherry ride and move into the big boy helicarrier."

"Make sure Fury didn't booby-trap it."

"Fury's dead."

"Okay," Carol says, willing to maintain that polite fiction. "Then make sure Hill didn't booby-trap it."

"I'll keep my eyes open." For a minute there, it's almost like _before_. The camaraderie, the easy banter: he half expects Wanda to walk through the door and tease Carol about having her head in the clouds, expects Thor to come behind her and unfasten his cape and inquire about dinner. They talk easily, unburdened by guilt or grief, and Carol and Tony share a look across the room, a look of _can you believe we get to have this_ , an understanding that comes from having seen the worst of each other without passing judgment.

It's a What If; it has no bearing on reality. Tony puts it away. He has a six-mile drop to worry about.

* * *

He puts on his coffin and falls. As he falls, he whispers in Friday's ear. "I'm glad he's dead," he tells her. He should've said it to Carol; that would have been more honest.

* * *

29871200012.23.2  
PASSIVE MODE //

NB: This is irregular—

TS: I know, and I appreciate your cooperation. 

NB: Hell, if you can figure out what happened we'll appreciate yours. Grif's a good guy. Kind of a grouch, but a good man.

TS: You think there's a chance he's still alive?

NB: The statistics are against him, but this isn't really a normal case. We don't run up against many of the…

TS: It's fine, you can say it.

NB: We don't have all the crazy shit here that you do in New York, but we aren't completely ignorant. A regular criminal couldn't overpower Grif, especially not when he had the kids with him.

TS: Could I speak with Lucy Cervantes?

NB: She's pretty traumatized. Doesn't recall much, but you're welcome to try provided you don't mind taking me into the room with you.

TS: Of course not.

NB: Good.

TS: They were investigating a warehouse?

NB: Yeah. Got a tip about a fugitive in the area.

TS: What else is out that way?

NB: Couple of farms. We're far enough from Omaha that there isn't much out here other than cornfields.

TS: Family farms?

NB: Contract farms. Most of them are working for Cargill. There's a big research facility, too.

TS: What is it?

NB: FuturePharm. They're really out in the middle of nowhere. I think they do some contract work with the government.

TS: How far is the drive to Omaha?

NB: About an hour. Little more if you're headed downtown.

TS: Were there signs of a struggle?

NB: That old building was such a wreck. It'd be hard to tell if there were.

TS: Not much to go on.

NB: You're tellin' me.

TS: I'd like to talk to Ms. Cervantes now.

NB: Sure thing. Let me grab a cup of coffee for her, that girl lives on caffeine. Can I get you something?

TS: I don't need anything, but thanks.

* * *

frontline.ny > politics > registration

**STARK TAKES CONTROL OF S.H.I.E.L.D.**   
_By Sally Floyd_

In an unprecedented demonstration of influence, Tony Stark has been appointed head of the Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage, and Logistics Directorate.

Stark was only recently appointed a deputy director of the organization. He was installed as the leader of the newly-created Registration Division, which concerns itself solely with the enforcement of the Registration Act. 

News of Stark's promotion broke only hours ago, when Secretary of Defense Jack Kooning held an early-morning press conference. No mention was made of previous director Maria Hill other than to say she was taking a period of "indefinite leave."

Those are the facts. The eagle-eyed are left to read between the lines of what has been _said_ and what has been _done_. Over the past two years, Stark, already untouchable, has climbed threateningly close to the pinnacle of the mountain. He went from occasional expert witness to a mainstay of the Department of Defense's payroll, and from there to SHIELD consultant. By the time the Registration Act passed, half of Congress was nestled in his pocket and he was well on his way to absolute control over SHIELD and its subsidiary entities. That language is by far the most applicable; Stark is running SHIELD the same way he runs his Fortune 500 company but with far less success.

Of course, as acting director, Stark is positioned to use the extraordinary legal liberties granted to the Director of SHIELD to continue furthering his own interests. There is, of course, Prison 42, the extra-dimensional supermax facility whose construction was contracted out to Stark Industries. There's the persistent rumor of insider trading, although Stark claims that the legalization of the Registration Act and his company's concurrent surge in stock prices are a mere coincidence. There is even the concern that Stark might use SHIELD's vast reserve of exotic technology to fuel a grotesque habit of body modification that at this point is less an experiment and more a fetish. None of these should be considered in isolation.

Stark may have been officially cleared of all charges concerning Steve Rogers' death, but what he has done and continues to do to this nation and to Rogers' legacy is an act no less violent or criminal. Rogers so believed in the principles of privacy, freedom, and self-determination that he gave his life for his cause. Stark, who hides inside his armor at the top of his tower, appears to have no such conviction.

(NEXT PAGE: RUNNING THE NUMBERS ON STARK INDUSTRIES)

(SUGGESTED: BREAKOUT AT NEW YORK WOMEN'S CORRECTIONAL FACILITY)

* * *

At the top of the tower where the Avengers lived, there is light and shadow. More shadow now, though: Tony doesn't turn on the lights because he doesn't need the lights. He carries a hollow golden glow within; he can light up his eyes in infrared and ultraviolet. Nobody else lives here, so he can dispense with the pleasantries. Even Friday is off in her own world, although some part of Friday is always waiting, listening, making her own plans and revising her own contingencies.

They all had their own suites here. The new helicarrier quarters the new government-sanctioned Avengers, but here once upon a time they'd made a home. He walks past their rooms: Jan and Carol, Adam and Luke, Natasha and Monica and Peter. And at the end, on opposite sides of the hall, Tony and Steve. Tony's door is open. Steve's door is not.

He's suddenly struck by the thought that someone should clean out Steve's room. He's suddenly struck by the thought that _he_ should clean out Steve's room. Tony is struck by thoughts all day long, a thousand every minute, his mind a planetary body under ceaseless bombardment by a shower of meteorites; but this thought seems remarkable.

Tony opens the door. His gauntlet clinks faintly against the doorknob; the metals drag against each other when he drops his hand back to his side. It makes him aware that he is, in his other hand, carrying a shield. There's blood on it, on the back side and a little on the rim. Steve wasn't carrying this when he was shot because Steve was unarmed and handcuffed when he was shot; the blood came from later, when Tony had laid the shield over Steve's body. He hasn't been to see Steve since then, though. From whence did the shield come, that's the question, but if Tony had the answer to that, he could rewind time back to the moment when they drew Steve out of the water in his gleaming mail, a hero from a bygone age. _Hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus._ Is it any wonder he loved Steve?

He sets the shield down on the bed. It's neatly made, which you'd expect; there are books on the nightstand and a tablet on the desk, which you'd expect; there's a stack of sketchpads and a riot of artist's tools and a couple of pictures, all the pictures you'd expect. Steve was pretty neat, but not neurotically so, especially in this space where he didn't have to impose military order. The bed is made, but there's a few pairs of shoes right inside the door instead of in the closet, a jacket tossed on top of the dresser, a dirty coffee mug on top of the bookcase. The lampshade is askew. Tony straightens the lampshade. Someone should clean out this room. Steve's personal effects, those should go to someone who loved him—Sam, or Sharon—

Tony hits a blank wall and drifts over to the bookcase. There's all the authors you'd expect, if you were Tony Stark and you knew Steve Rogers: Bill Mauldin, Frederick Douglass, Doris Kearns Goodwin, J.R.R. Tolkien. There's all the titles you wouldn't expect: _The Demon-Haunted World, The Da Vinci Code,_ something called _The Artist's Way._ Tony leaves the books on the bookshelf. He picks up a sketchpad instead.

This, here, is the real violation, but he's already violated Steve's memory in so many ways that one more incursion isn't going to damn him any more deeply than he's already damned. Anyway, Steve used to love to share his sketches with Tony—not to the point of handing over his whole sketchpad, but always with the half-eager, half-shy expectation that Tony would _want_ to see what Steve had drawn. Tony always did want to see. He still wants to see.

There are a few loose pages tucked in the front, covered with all the sketches you'd expect: skylines, studies, little cartoons in the margins. A half-finished dress almost certainly copied from a Van Dyne design. The shield, and then a series of stars that grew progressively more regular. Nick Fury, looking surprised, cigar falling out of his mouth. The Avengers logo, crammed into one corner between a series of tires and the same lampshade Tony had just straightened. He flips to the very end of the sketchbook and then, startled, works from back to front. This can't be right, but the proof is undeniable. 

Across every page, over and over again, Tony is flayed open across the paper. 

Here's his figure, leaning forward flirtatiously or looking away. Here's his hands, the burn scar at the base of his thumb that was only recently healed by Extremis, the blunt edge of his fingernails and fine tips of his fingers. Here's his suits, three-button and double-breasted, models fifteen and twenty. Here's an entire page of just his jawline and his beard.

"What do you think that is?" Steve asks.

The air has been punched out of him. It takes a moment for him to get past the vacuum-suck in his lungs and start breathing again. "I don't… I don't know."

"You always know," Steve says. "Why do you think I would flay you open like this, over and over again?"

Tony turns the page and finds the latest version of his armor. The attention to detail is incredible, the care far beyond what Tony would expect; he never thought anyone other than he himself saw the Iron Man like this.

"It's a study, isn't it?" Steve says gently.

"Yes," Tony manages.

"What is it a study of, Tony?"

And over and over again, there's one thing Steve came back to. Furrowed in concentration, slack with shock, lit up with anger and with joy—at rest, in thought, with sorrow—over and over again, Steve came back to Tony's face. The range of emotions, the nakedness, is terrifying. Being seen is always terrifying. This is a march of what Tony has tried to excise, all the human flaws and human sins he's learning how to code out of himself.

"What is it a study of, Tony?" 

Tony knows. He always knows. 

"Weakness," he says.

"See?" Steve says. "I was right about you all along."

* * *

The Meade County Times

**LOCAL MAN GONE MISSING**   
_POLICE SEARCH FOR RETIREE FROM BOX ELDER_

Police are looking for Gary Grey, 68, a retired woodworker and shop teacher. 

Mr. Grey was last seen the evening of the 12th by his wife, Grace. He left for the grocery store around 7 o'clock and never returned home. Security footage shows Mr. Grey pulling out of the store parking lot at 8 o'clock. His car was found abandoned on the side of 225th Street.

Mr. Grey is a white man standing 5'9" with silvering hair. He has glasses and at the time of his disappearance was wearing blue jeans and a Sioux Falls Cougars t-shirt. Mr. Grey also has a large birthmark on his right arm.

Please contact the Box Elder Police Department with any information.

10 COMMENTS | SHOW COMMENTS

**krak000m** • 8h ago  
cornfield murder

**sucksmcghee13** • 8h ago  
Cornfield murder

**txstar_s** • 8h ago  
They're going with cornfield kidnappings b/c nbody's found bodies

**krak000m** • 7h ago  
we all know it's a murder dude

**billharbourd** • 6h ago  
What was his alias?

**minnie4radians** • 6h ago  
Green Thumb, afaik he mostly stuck to scaring teenagers who tried to vandalize the community garden. he probably didn't need to register but he did anyway.

**d4zzl3rf4n** • 6h ago  
DEFINITELY A CORNFIELD MURDER

**mrsfelicityjones1950** • 5h ago  
Poor Gary our thoughts & prayers are with his family may God watch over him

**txstar_s** • 2h ago  
Are all of you here from the Murder Exported forums

**krak000m** • 1h ago  
well not all of us

* * *

If you rewound the footage, you'd see this:

Tony takes his helmet off.

* * *

CLASSIFIED INTERNAL MEMO  
FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY

As always, I must begin with the disclaimer that this is merely a series of broad impressions. My contact with Director Stark has been limited, and there are only so many recommendations I can make without further violating the ethical standards of my field.

It is my opinion that Director Stark _may_ be too emotionally compromised to effectively dispatch his duties. There is only one positive indication of this assessment (noted in our prior communication, although again I must stress that this is observational only and that nobody has eyes on the Director of SHIELD at all times), but there are a number of negative indications that may offer additional evidence. This is another conversation better had in person.

Director Stark was already carrying a heavy burden thanks to his role in the passage and enforcement of the Registration Act and additionally experienced significant personal loss during the subsequent splintering of the Avengers and the death of Steve Rogers, with whom he was once close friends. Certainly that burden has not been lessened by his assumption of Maria Hill's role, but Tony Stark has always been a man who under duress either fails spectacularly or rises past all conceivable expectations. He is a man of extremes. In my experience, the latter is far more likely than the former.

Although it may be an inconsequential detail, I was informed that Director Stark shut off security cameras and spent approximately thirty minutes in the cold storage cell in which Captain Rogers' body was being held.

Please let me know if I may be of further assistance.

L. Samson

* * *

Tony goes down, down, down to the great cathedral built beneath his tower. He doesn't come here much these days; there's no coming back from final impenitence, not when the opportunity for contrition is long past, not when he's living a twilight existence that is as close to the afterlife as he'll ever come. Some hours he feels like he's already dead, but his body has yet to catch up.

"Password, boss?" Friday says.

When he was young, Arthur was a fairy tale: something told to him by his mother in bits and pieces before bedtime or when she needed him quiet. He'd liked the grandeur of it, the romance, the chivalry—the hopeless idealism, if he could be honest. Only later in life, when he'd read _Le Morte d'Arthur_ himself for the first time, did he realize how censored his mother's tales were. The romance in the source was balanced by a kind of thoughtless brutality that other people might have excused as being 'of the time.' Tony didn't like that excuse, but there was still something there that drew him back to Malory, whose work was far from the earliest but who still loomed over everyone who came both before and after.

A secret part of Tony sympathized the most not with Lancelot but with Igraine, violated by a man who stole into her bed under one guise but was revealed for another. It reminded him of Indris, of Kathy, of Tiberius, of... 

On his better days, it reminded him that sometimes an Arthur could be born from a terrible union. 

The story started like this: Uther Pendragon, king of all England, saw the wife of the Duke of Tintagel and desired her. She turned him away and fled with her husband (there's the faithfulness, not in her rejection but in their trust and devotion to one another). Uther followed and laid siege and his armies broke on the walls of Tintagel (there's the strength, the courage to publicly flip the bird to the king of all England instead of running away with your lover in the night, which is what Tony would've done if his powers of prophecy had been up to scratch). So one of Uther's knights—one of the really rotten ones, Tony always assumed—he goes to Uther, and he tells Uther about this guy called Merlin—

"You're joking," Steve had said.

"No, I'm serious," Tony says, sincere in his belief that his favorite fucked-up story is far more fucked-up than Steve's favorite fucked-up story. Steve prefers the term 'tragedy,' but they both know they're talking about the same thing. "Ulfius tells Uther about this guy called Merlin, and he promises Uther he'll track down Merlin if it's the last thing he does. So Ulfius goes off adventuring, and he finds an old beggar by the side of the road, and the beggar asks what Ulfius is looking for."

"What did Ulfius say?" Steve has a tactician's ability to scent where a story is going.

"Ulfius says he's looking for a wizard because his king is wasting away for want of a woman, and the beggar says, well, hey, I know the guy you're seeking. Thou seekest Merlin, but seek no further, for I am he. And then Merlin says, if your king will give me what I desire, I'll give him what he desires." 

"What did Merlin want?"

"He wanted the kid Uther would have with Igraine," Tony says. "He wanted Arthur. So Merlin gives Uther the likeness of the Duke of Tintagel, and Uther rides to Igraine in the night and, looking like her husband, he rapes her."

Steve is nakedly repulsed.

"It gets worse," Tony assures him. "In the morning, Igraine learns that her husband died the day before, and even though she's grieving, she marvels over those last few hours, you know? And after an appropriate amount of time, Uther sends Ulfius to Igraine with an offer of marriage, and Igraine accepts, because that's how things worked back then, I guess. After they've been married a while Uther asks who her baby daddy is, and Igraine says, you know what, that's weird because my husband came to me when he should've been dead, and Uther says: boy have I got some news for you."

"How did she react?"

"She made great joy, supposedly," Tony says. "But how was she supposed to react? Uther already chased her all over the country and killed her husband to get to her, imagine what he'd do if she ran away with his heir. She didn't have much by way of choice."

"I thought Merlin was a hero," Steve says.

"Aw, did you watch the Disney movie too many times?" Tony teases, and then, when Steve looks blank, says, "Don't worry, we'll watch it together. I thought Merlin was a hero when I was a kid, too. Maybe he knew Arthur had to be born, though. Maybe he didn't see any other way."

"There's always another way," Steve says, stubborn, because he's the real kind of hero, the kind that's solid all the way through, the kind that doesn't have any hidden hollows where he stores his machinations. 

"I hope there always will be," Tony says.

But that was years ago, and he's lost the metaphor, or maybe the real conclusion is that Tony over-identifies with all fictional people and under-identifies with all real ones.

"Password, boss?" Friday repeats patiently.

"Thou seekest Merlin," Tony says, and then he goes into his workshop.

The lights are dimmed, the glass cases holding his armor cast in a reflective sheen that only hints at the threatening figures within. If he bothered taking his armor off anymore, he'd be in slippers and one of his ragged bathrobes, but he's in the armor, so he doesn't sit, doesn't sprawl, doesn't kick his feet out in front of him and prop his chin in his palm as he stares off into the distance and thinks.

* * *

DAEDALUS: We're getting nowhere.

BOWMAN: I never took you for defeatist.

DAEDALUS: I'm aware that not all of us are on your intellectual playing field—

BOWMAN: Oh?

DAEDALUS: Don't condescend. Even you can see we're far behind our projected timeline. We need more people. 

BOWMAN: This isn't a real clinical trial.

DAEDALUS: We can still be rigorous.

BOWMAN: Of course, but it's also absurd to pretend that we don't have enough data to move forward. Don't mistake me. We won't stop testing, but I am not going to put this operation in jeopardy merely because you want to replicate predictable results an additional hundred times.

DAEDALUS: Many mice died to bring us this information. 

BOWMAN: Our pool for late-stage subjects is limited enough.

DAEDALUS: And high-profile enough that we have to be even more cautious. I do understand.

BOWMAN: They haven't put together the pieces yet.

DAEDALUS: Like I said. There aren't many people playing in your league, much less in your ballpark.

* * *

"Any luck on Hill?"

Dugan sighs the ash-gut sigh of a man who drinks only whisky and eats only gravel. _"Nothing. No indications of kidnapping or assassination, no chatter that our moles are picking up."_

"She vanished."

 _"More or less, yeah,"_ Dugan says in Tony's ear.

"That leads me to believe that she removed herself from the board."

 _"There are people or agencies who are capable of taking out even the director of SHIELD."_ Dugan pauses. _"You were one of the people on that list."_

"Oh? Who are the others?"

_"I'm sure you can guess. Director."_

Dugan's telling the truth, but if Tony had to lay money, he'd lay money on Maria Hill, who is every bit as much a bastard as Fury. They won't stop looking for her; his personal regard for her aside, Tony never wanted and never asked to be made director precisely because he's aware of his tendency to abuse positions of power when he manages to seize them. Agreeing to work for SHIELD at all was a too-late overture, a desperate grasp at a check-and-balance system that never really did much to balance him in the first place. And more importantly, Hill was far more suited to the position. Tony had never had any intention of taking the job from someone who executed her duties with such extreme competence.

What he wants, what he really wants, is to crawl into bed and sleep. He doesn't sleep anymore, and that's an oversight, because if you remove the need to sleep you should remove the desire to sleep, too. The problem with complex systems is that the effects of removing one outdated component inevitably lead to the discovery of complicating factors. When he slept the best, though, was when he'd been on a month-long binge of invention, when he'd locked himself in the garage and lost whole days to narrow focus on a single idea and then, when the project was complete, he'd stagger over to his cot in the corner and sleep dreamlessly for twelve or fourteen hours, safe under his tower and Friday's watchful eye. There was always a cost to pay later: the comedown, the sharp decline from not only the high of working but from that neutrally stable place of good sleep and a good morning after. It didn't last, but Tony has always been a sucker for the most fleeting of positive experiences.

Tony's least favorite fucked-up story is himself.

"Nebraska?" he asks.

_"No breaks there. Still not sure why you want to grind that one into the ground—"_

"Technically, it falls under the umbrella of the Registration Division."

_"So give it to Danvers. We have bigger problems."_

"I have a hunch, Timothy," Tony says. 

_"And your hunch is better than another man's certainty?"_

"You said it, not me. Anyway, we both know how to multitask." Tony's a couple of miles up, en route from New York City to Washington, D.C. in acceptance of the beckoning hand of his betters. If he's lucky, he might get to take in a show or two while he's there. There is, of course, a sizable stable of agents of SHIELD in the country's capital, which always comes in handy. Tony's used to having his own private army; that he now commands spies and black ops teams instead of gods and super-soldiers affects his plans less than one might expect.

 _"You ready to sit through the circus?"_ Dugan asks. He has the leisure to ask that. Nobody expects Dum Dum Dugan to dress up in a suit and thank a pack of politicians for an opportunity he never wanted. That's fair. That's fine. Tony wears a suit better than anyone.

"Please," Tony counters, "you know I'm the ringmaster." This is absurd. They both know he isn't going to D.C. for the dog-and-pony show, but Dugan isn't going to say it, and Tony sure as hell isn't going to say it, and Friday for once is keeping her mouth shut, so they're stuck in this fucking circular conversation until one of them breaks and cuts the line.

Carol will be there. Rhodey will probably be there, too. They want Tony to speak, to say a couple of words. He has three days to come up with something or to stick his head in the oven, whichever most inspires him. No. He's better than that. He can do better. He's always thought a good way to go would be to fly himself up three hundred miles or so, into low Earth orbit, and slowly replace his oxygen flow with some kind of nontoxic asphyxiant while he takes in the view. Nitrogen, maybe. It's just a What If. Everybody has one.

He hangs up on Dugan. Friday will make his excuses. Tony has better things to think about.

* * *

_From the private files of Cora Birch, provided to Stark Industries Archival Department by request of Virginia Potts-Hogan._

BIRCH: What's the hardest part about working with Steve?

STARK: Oh god.

ROGERS: C'mon, be honest.

STARK: Stop smirking, it isn't attractive. Let's see, the hardest part about working with Cap… is that nobody would believe how mean he is to me. Obviously I'm kidding, don't put that in the book.

BIRCH: People do have this idea of you, that you're humorless.

STARK: They see an icon, not a person.

ROGERS: I made my peace with that a long time ago.

BIRCH: You two have talked about this before.

ROGERS: At this point, I don't think there's anything we haven't talked about.

STARK: Lots of time to kill on those long quinjet rides to the moon and back.

BIRCH: Not that I don't want to hear about that, but—

STARK: Right, your question. The hardest thing about working with Steve.

BIRCH: Would you like me to table it until we're alone?

ROGERS: If you're uncomfortable—

STARK: No, I'm just thinking. Don't worry so much.

ROGERS: Pot, kettle.

STARK: How well you know me is definitely a downside. No, kidding again. I'm not sure how definitive of an answer I can give you, but something that's difficult about working with him is how high his standards are. That sounds like the cheap answer, you know, he's Captain America, of course his standards are high—but this isn't a Cap thing, it's a Steve Rogers thing. He's a far cry from perfect, but he always expects himself to act from this place of compassion and… 'honor' is the word I want, if that isn't too romantic... and even when he doesn't meet those standards, he picks himself up and tries again. He doesn't give up that ideal, even when his back's against a wall. When you're around someone like that, how can you not strive to do the same?

ROGERS: Tony.

STARK: Hey, she said 'most difficult,' not 'worst.' Deep, right? Have I mentioned that he hides the TV remote?

* * *

Senator John Boynton (D-NY) had been the one to introduce the Superhuman Registration Act to the 109th U.S. Congress. It had passed through both the Senate and the House with unprecedented speed; Friday staged an entire holographic production of Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just a Bill" to either cheer Tony up or piss him off—hard to tell with her. The president signed the act into law in the early days of summer. A matter of hours after it passed, Steve Rogers, in one of his usual unintentionally iconic displays, had announced his decision to resist Registration and go underground. Neither the announcement nor the resistance were peaceful. 

Senator John Boynton (D-NY) has been awarded numerous accolades: the Congressional Gold Medal, the Wallop Howard Leadership Award, the title of Tony's personal nemesis. He doesn't know he and Tony are nemeses, but that's fine; Tony has always been more than capable of constructing a narrative without any awareness from the other involved party.

This is the show he wants to see.

The nominal ceremony to make permanent Tony's tenure as director was pretty basic. He's been to two dozen similar events before, and they're all the same: the usual parade of bland white faces, the hand press, the humorous asides that land just shy of vulgar. Congratulations, Tony. Finally got what you wanted, Tony. Hope whatever happened to Hill doesn't happen to you, Tony. Yeah, Tony hopes that too. It's the only thing he still hopes for himself, on his own behalf. His other hopes are nebulous, a vast starscape haloing his head. On a clear night, he can pick them out in the distance. On a really clear night, he can even remember their names. Here's 'Hope Pepper isn't alone' and 'Hope Happy wasn't in pain'; here's 'Hope Boynton's at the top of this food chain' strung alongside 'Hope nobody looks too closely at my extradimensional prison' and 'Hope nobody uses this as an excuse to resurrect Wideawake'; here's a binary system, 'Hope Steve didn't die hating me' hidden in the corona of 'Hope Steve hated me until his very last breath.' So maybe there are some hopes that still shine just for Tony. 

Wishing on stars never solved anything, though; it's one more useless tendency he can shed or alter or excise. He prefers the term _excision_ because it implies something neat, clean, surgical, something efficient, something brutally delicate. It implies a total severance, a resection, the sort of precise non-pain that comes from using a very sharp scalpel to cut through tissue and muscle. Tony has performed surgery on himself before. He knows what it's like to be armed with a tool so sharp you don't feel the hurt until you look down at what you did and realize you're bleeding.

There are two things that make Tony's party better than other people's parties. The first is the dress code. His attendants, including the estimable Secretary of Defense, are in Hugo Boss and Brioni; but Tony is wearing a bespoke suit, something far more beautiful than any construction of mere fabric. On the outside it gleams. On the inside it gleams. What is housed beneath the suit does not gleam, but not a single person here can tell if Tony's shaved, if he's dressed, if he's clean. Of course he is. He's a master of nanomachinary. No sodium polyacrylate or maximum absorbancy garments here—Tony has a waste disposal system that puts NASA to shame.

The second thing is that about twenty minutes into the post-shitshow meet-and-greet, three men in dark suits arrive. They confer for a moment by the hors d'oeuvres. Two of them are wearing visible earpieces; beneath their suit jackets are pieces that are less visible. They approach Senator Boynton, who, with the unknowing blindness of a domesticated sheep, does not realize that what comes into the pasture are not dogs but wolves. The man without pieces says something brief to Boynton. There's a ripple of shock on Boynton's face—no, more like the pieceless man is the ripple and Boynton gets caught in the wake.

Tony can read the words on the pieceless man's lips: _We'd like to speak to you outside._

Boynton, pale, nods his agreement.

And Tony can't not follow, can he? Is anyone here really paying him any attention? (Sure they are; he makes for a good show.) Out in the hall, Boynton is blubbering. Tony steps forward, inserts himself into the scene.

"Need any help, gentlemen?" he says, as though he doesn't know what's happening here, as though he isn't the head of the world's foremost intelligence agency, as though he weren't the architect and master of what is currently playing out.

Over Boynton's shoulder, he sees Steve. His face is cool and certain, impassive and righteous.

Piece One and Piece Two trade a flat-faced glance. Pieceless, above such pedestrian matters as hesitation, says, "Thank you, Director." And then, to Boynton: "Senator, you are under arrest."

Boynton doesn't say anything. The lines of his face pull tight—around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, behind which sit the _oh-shit-this-is-IT_ realization that only hits that hard in a very rich, very powerful man who thought he would continue to be very rich and very powerful until the day he died. That's the realization in Boynton's eyes: that he is powerful but not unassailably powerful, that he can't cheat his way out of everything. Tony has been in rooms with mirrors before. He knows that cast of features.

Boynton's principal sin was introducing the Registration Act. His subordinate sins, of which there are many, consist of the usual litany of greed and moral pliability combined with a keen interest in excising the useful portions of the SRA (medical coverage, mental health support, access to training and support services) and inserting inflammatory replacements (mandatory disclosure of powers, for one thing). Tony's never been sure of the degree to which Boynton was aware the Tony was acting against him; Tony is a consummate professional, always dressed in a suit and ready with a handshake, but Boynton's puppetmasters possess both deep pockets and deep secrets. Tony is here, right here, at this exact moment, because he wants Boynton to see his face. Understanding is too much to hope for, but Tony has planted the seed of understanding, and in another three or four years, after he's had time to sit in his solitary cell and contemplate his choices, Boynton may come to a realization about the architect of his misery.

When Senator John Boynton (D-NY) looks up, he doesn't see Tony Stark. He sees Iron Man, gleaming and impassive, a being made perfect and free from human sin. There remains some small organic matter within Iron Man, a quickly-failing bundle of bone and tissue and error. The useful parts of his organic matter have already been incorporated into the Iron Man, who does not sleep, does not need feeding, does not waste resources building castles in the air. Tony knows the hollow golden glow of that perfect instant will be enough to fuel him as he struggles towards the ultimate realization of being the Iron Man in every moment, not just some of them.

It's the best kind of What If: the What's Coming. He's close enough to making it a What Is that he can taste it on his lips, which will soon be replaced with a miniaturized molecular scanner. He's so close. If he could just step inside that hollow golden glow and live there—

* * *

BIRCH: What about you, Steve?

ROGERS: Pardon?

BIRCH: What do you find most difficult about working with Tony?

STARK: How much time do you have? 

ROGERS: Tony.

BIRCH: How often do you do that?

STARK: Do what?

ROGERS: He does it more often than you'd think, although you're sharp. Most folks don't catch it.

STARK: Dodging the question, Cap?

ROGERS: And that's another one of the more difficult things about knowing you.

STARK: My uncanny insight?

ROGERS: Sure, but what I meant is—you always have some sleight-of-hand going on.

STARK: I don't follow.

ROGERS: And you play dumb when it suits you. See, though, right there; you have us watching you conjure with your right hand while the left picks our pockets.

STARK: Ouch. 

ROGERS: It occasionally works against us, because the rest of us can't keep up with the way he pulls solutions out of thin air, but when your back's against the wall, it pays to have a conjurer on your side.

BIRCH: Does that speak to a lack of transparency?

ROGERS: On Tony's part? Sometimes.

STARK: Steve—

BIRCH: Tony, do you think he's right?

STARK: The idea that I'm a magician, that's a mischaracterization. I like to have contingency plans. I don't—I don't always do the best job of telling other people what I'm thinking.

BIRCH: Why do you think that is?

STARK: I have… a hard time reaching out.

ROGERS: And asking for help.

STARK: Sometimes.

BIRCH: You do know Tony pretty well, don't you?

ROGERS: Still waters run deep.

STARK: That gives me more credit than I deserve.

ROGERS: It gives you exactly the amount of credit you deserve. You're a hard person to know, but the reward is more than worth the effort. I've always thought…

BIRCH: Go on.

ROGERS: You have to make a study of him. A series of studies, like a series of sketches, and no matter how many times you draw him, you always discover something new.

BIRCH: Tony? What do you think of that?

STARK: You heartbreaker, you.

* * *

frontline.ny > politics

**BREAKING: BOYNTON ARRESTED**   
_By Sally Floyd_

This morning, Senator John Boynton woke promptly at five, spent thirty minutes cycling in his home gym while catching up on the morning's headlines, showered, kissed his wife, and left for work, where he attended his general staff meeting, spoke with two constituents about their concerns over immigration policy, called CNBC News to discuss a recent meeting of the Commission on Superhuman Activities, and sat for the day's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearings. This afternoon, he watched as SHIELD Director Tony Stark took the oath of office that made his temporary promotion in light of former director Maria Hill's abdication permanent. A few hours later, at the reception following Stark's swearing-in, Senator Boynton was led from the Willard InterContinental Hotel in handcuffs.

While neither the senator's office nor other channels have made any statements, sources suggest that Boynton's fall is not due to his handling of Registration. Boynton has been a figurehead of that movement, not only as the man to introduce the Act to Congress but also as its champion and, at times, its harshest critic. Where other proponents framed the Act as a social program, Boynton made it clear that Registration was a matter of law enforcement, not aid.

Perhaps most notably, a handful of Senator Boynton's longtime supporters quietly withdrew their support in the weeks leading up to today's arrest. An internal memo circulated at Oscorp (see the redacted version below) uncategorically stated that the company would no longer be donating to the Common American Causes PAC, which supports John Boynton and his campaign for reelection. 

Boynton, 68, has been a sitting senator for fourteen years. He is a Vietnam veteran, a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Vice Chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus. He is also tied for the record of most appearances by a U.S. senator on _The Daily Show_ , an innocuous bit of trivia that speaks of a much deeper-seated focus on publicity. 

(NEXT PAGE: THE SUPERMAX FACILITY WHERE BOYNTON MAY BE TRANSFERRED)

(SUGGESTED: A NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA?)

* * *

DAEDALUS: I suppose the real question is why anyone abides by the Declaration of Helsinki at all.

BOWMAN: Informed consent has its place.

DAEDALUS: But when the work you're doing is groundbreaking on a global scale… Every year we're delayed means more lives lost to natural causes.

BOWMAN: All innovators like to think their work is groundbreaking.

DAEDALUS: I wouldn't have thought you of all people would take the other side of this argument.

BOWMAN: It's an interesting intellectual exercise, if nothing else. What is legal and what is ethical don't always align, but in this instance there's a very real and recent ethical foundation for the law. What's so special about my work? Is it really that much more visionary than the work of the other hundred people who are skirting the rules right now?

DAEDALUS: Yes.

BOWMAN: Of course it is, but we aren't really arguing objective value. What we're talking about is perception, that disconnect between the internal state and what the external world assigns as motive. Tony is a textbook case. This Registration bullshit, for example. Do you really believe he's leading the charge because he thinks it's the right thing to do?

DAEDALUS: I don't pay attention to politics. I have no idea.

BOWMAN: He doesn't either.

DAEDALUS: It's serving our purposes, at least.

BOWMAN: Yes.

DAEDALUS: He's too distracted to devote any attention to running us down.

BOWMAN: Well. And that, too.

* * *

frontline.ny > opinion

**FALLEN SON**   
_By Ben Urich_

So. It was raining the day of the funeral, and 2.5 million people lined the avenue from the Capitol Building to Arlington National Cemetery. They were universally soaked through, shivering, and miserable. I wish I could say that they bore the conditions without complaint, that each and every person present was devoted to paying respect, not making spectacle, but that wouldn't be the America I knew, and it wouldn't be the America Steve Rogers knew either. Of course people were complaining about the weather, and arguing about politics, and talking about how expensive hotels are in D.C., and polling each other to see who says 'soda' and who uses 'pop,' because if you put ten Americans in a room you'll end up with twelve opinions about any one topic. Some of the arguments were ugly. Some of them made me ashamed to call myself an American. Some of them would've made Steve Rogers ashamed to call himself an American, too. It was an honest sort of ugliness. It showed exactly who we are, as Steve Rogers knew us, and as we know ourselves.

I had the pleasure of meeting Steve on a handful of occasions, and what always stuck with me was his anger. You might be thinking of Cap punching the Red Skull in the face, or quaking with righteous fury as he stood toe-to-toe with Ultron; but his anger wasn't an idealized, mythological kind of anger. He got mad. He got pissed off. He'd swear when he stubbed his toe (I was there; I heard it) and he'd yell at teammates when he thought they stepped out of line and he held grudges with the fervor of a true, born-again believer. We once spent twenty minutes talking about the importance of solar energy in third-world countries, because, as Cap told me with all the bite and ire of a good man who saw other men doing nothing, it wasn't fair to expect someone who struggled to feed their children to care about saving manatees. 

It was raining, and someone somewhere had come up with the dumb idea to have Cap's procession consist solely of a single white horse pulling a casket draped in the American flag. I like to think he would've been baffled by that, and maybe a little amused by the possibility of the horse wandering off the rails when some eight-year-old offered him a piece of candy. The horse was just as soaked and miserable as the rest of us. I hope his caretaker unhitched him later, and rubbed him down with a clean towel, and fed him a warm mash before the patter of the rain on the stable roof lulled him to sleep. I could use an evening like that; I bet he could, too.

You can't talk about Steve Rogers without talking about the people around him. He built communities as easily as some of his peers built skyscrapers. Cap may not have been a founding member of the Avengers, but he was so quickly deemed a foundational member of the team that the founders rewrote their history to include him at the inception. Every Avenger I have met has gone out of their way to assure me that the Avengers are not merely a team but a family that has been knit together through years of highs and lows, triumphs and sorrows and the many days in between where we all get about the more ordinary business of living. 

A few years ago I was allowed to go through a box of old photographs for a story I was doing on Avengers Mansion. There was a candid in there of Carol Danvers and Wanda Maximoff sitting on a kitchen counter sharing a carton of ice cream. I showed the picture to Carol. "Wanda and I were always getting caught eating out of the carton," she said. "Steve took that picture, and then he blew it up and gave us each a copy for Christmas." I told her I was surprised that Cap, a noted cartoonist, hadn't sketched them. "I said that, too," she replied. "And he said that by the time he finished drawing us, the ice cream would've melted."

It was still raining, and Cap's six pallbearers looked just as soaked and miserable as the horse that came before them. Of course, the weather didn't really matter; they would've been just as miserable on a balmy beach with clear skies and warm winds. Misery likes to travel. You'd recognize most of those pallbearers if you've picked up a newspaper in the past decade: King T'Challa, Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four, Colonel Carol Danvers herself, and of course Sam Wilson, Cap's partner. The fifth, less recognizable but no less pedigreed, was Rick Jones; the sixth was a man simply identified as a 'friend.' He looked to be about Cap's age and was no less miserable than the rest.

If you're anything like me, you hope every funeral is not only an opportunity to mourn but also to remember all the good times. You know what I mean—it's that moment when you meet someone else's eyes and you laugh through your tears about the poor dead sorry son of a bitch. No one laughed at Captain America's funeral. No one laughed later, either. Maybe they would have, under other circumstances. If there's such a thing as a good death, then Steve Rogers' death was assuredly a bad one. He staked his flag on a principle and refused to lower it even when his brothers were fighting for the other side. And, by all popular measures, he lost. How many of his friends didn't attend his funeral for fear they would be arrested?

So: Cap lost. They stripped him of his shield and his freedom and, handcuffed, marched him up the steps of a courthouse, where he was fatally shot in the head and the chest by an unknown assailant. We all saw it live, on national TV. It's the Kennedy assassination and the Challenger tragedy all rolled into one. How many schoolkids were following Captain America's trial as a current events project in their homerooms? 

It was raining, and his pallbearers settled Steve's casket beside an open grave marked by the same plain marble headstone as the next soldier over. Someone, probably the same idiot who came up with the horse, wanted to stick a big statue of Cap right at the crest of a hill and put Cap's body to rest beneath it, but Sam Wilson dug in his feet, a tactic he honed alongside the only other man as stubborn as him. You can guess who flinched first. After that fight, Sam still had the fortitude to stand in front of an entire world and give a eulogy that will surely go down in history alongside the Gettysburg Address and FDR's inaugural assertion that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself as one of the great pieces of American oration. Too bad Sam didn't put his foot down about the horse, too.

Earlier I said that 'they' stripped him of his shield and 'they' handcuffed him instead of affording him the dignity he deserved, which was disingenuous bullshit of the kind Steve Rogers abhorred. Every journalist who chooses Steve Rogers as a subject encounters this problem sooner or later, because you can't write about one without eventually writing about the other. 'They' didn't strip Cap of his shield. Tony Stark did.

Whatever happened at the end, no one can deny that Tony Stark loved Steve Rogers as dearly as any man ever loved another. I know; I can hear you cursing at me right now, but I am telling you this as someone who saw them together. Steve once said that Tony Stark gave him a home in a time when he was as lost as he had been in a theater of war; and if Stark gave him a home, then in Steve and the Avengers Tony Stark must have found a family. This was not a battle fought by enemies but by brothers. So Tony Stark was there to pay his respects (and maybe make a bit of spectacle, too). Of course he was. He neither spoke nor showed his face, but that's fine. Maybe he really was ordering drone strikes from inside his helmet, or maybe he just couldn't stand to let us see him grieve.

It was raining when they laid Steve Rogers to rest. Maybe this time it'll stick. We've thought him dead before, and he took us by surprise. I hope he gets his rest this time, though. He deserves it. He may not have had a good death, but he had a good life—not a perfect life, but if St. Peter doesn't punch Cap's pass through the gates of heaven, then the poor sorry sons of bitches he left behind don't have any hope at all. We're still stuck out here in the rain, but you can take comfort in this: if Steve Rogers were here, he'd be arguing and shivering and soaked through and miserable right alongside the rest of us, too.

* * *

TO: Ben Urich <burich@frontline.ny>  
FROM: Sally Floyd <sfloyd@frontline.ny>  
SUBJECT: Bad PR

Why didn't he take the helmet off?

* * *

4172980004.1.1.1.1  
PASSIVE MODE //

JV: I can't believe we're doing this. Why are we here, Tony?

TS: It's what he would've wanted. He deserves the chance to rest.

JV: What he would've wanted? Going back in the ice?

HP: Fuck it's freezing.

TS: It's what he would've wanted. I believe that. We're the ones responsible for pulling him out of the ocean, we should be the ones responsible for putting him back in it.

HP: And this way no one will know where his body is.

JV: What?

HP: It's what I would've… I just meant that we're making sure no one can find Steve's body. No exhuming him to run experiments, no more attempts to replicate the super-soldier serum. Right, Tony?

JV: Tony.

TS: Yes. Sorry. Yes. 

JV: He would've wanted that. Maybe not the ice, but… God. I miss him.

HP: I still can't believe—

JV: Me either.

HP: What's in the grave at Arlington? An LMD? The shield?

TS: No. He wanted somebody else to have the shield.

JV: Did he.

TS: Don't look at me like that. I didn't mean me. 

JV: Hush, Tony. I wasn't being accusatory. I'm actually surprised it wasn't you.

HP: Tony?

JV: Is there something over there—?

TS: We should say a few words.

HP: Sam said more than I ever could.

JV: This is private, though, Hank. It's just for us. Or for Thor, maybe. All the ones who aren't here.

HP: Then… thank you, Cap. 

JV: I hope you knew while you were still alive everything I want to say now. How much I respect you. How much I value our friendship.

HP: How you were always there when we needed someone to entertain Clint and help him burn off energy while we were trying to concentrate.

JV: Remember how he used to go in and jump on Steve's bed whenever he was moping?

HP: Remember how Steve decided he was going to adopt three teenagers and start his own team of Avengers?

JV: That sure showed us. And, oh. The thing with the microwave—

HP: When we showed him how to pop popcorn?

JV: The moon landing blew his mind.

HP: He was always bitching about baseball, though. 

JV: I have one of his sketches framed in my office. It was that A-line evening gown with the side slit that I designed for Wanda from one of my earlier collections. He drew her wearing that with this gorgeous pair of Saint Laurent earrings.

HP: He saved my ass a lot.

JV: He saved all our asses a lot. 

JV: [ _muffled_ ]

HP: Anything to add, Shellhead?

JV: Tony? What are you looking at?

* * *

Scope is the ratio of anchor rode to water depth. There once was a woman named Maria Carbonell who believed this was more valuable information than any idea put forth in the field of ballistics. With smaller boats you might have a hybrid rode that was made partially of warp to save on weight, but the anchors of larger vessels were made solely of chain. You couldn't wear away at chain, you couldn't worry it until it frayed, you couldn't abrade it until it broke. No matter how much you wanted to cut the chain you were still

* * *

He builds the best kind of What If. He starts with his hand, his right hand, so he can do the fine motor work with his left. The hand is an ideal test site: should any part of the process fail, he can replace his fingers or palm or the whole entire thing with a conventional prosthetic while he revises and replicates his process. 

He peels back the skin first. He unzips his skin. With it he cuts away the hunger, that pang to have someone touch him gently. When was the last time someone touched him gently? When was the last time someone touched him? His fingernails come out too, shucked from the tips of his fingers, and he lays them out in a neat straight row before tugging the inside-out glove of skin over and away from his nail beds until the whole piece of it comes free.

He pares away the muscle next. It's meat, it's just raw matter from a bygone era, the kind of thing that should've been discarded alongside coal furnaces and cylinder phonographs. Messy wet wanting goes with it, all those impulses he can't control, all those feelings he can't control, all those desires he can't control.

He severs the fine ligaments with surgical precision. It takes time and patience to tease the web of sinew away from bone; sometimes he imagines using a dull deboning knife, one that tugs at the filaments of flesh until the edge catches just right and the collagen splits apart. His arm is intact above the carpals, just the tip of his radius and ulna poking out from the cross-section of tissue that curves around the exposed bone. He doesn't feel pain, because pain is an outdated diagnostic tool. Tony receives real-time feedback from all of his components, data that is precise and exact and useful and does not hurt no matter how deserved the hurt might be. It's one of those sins he should carve away: the wish to be free from pain rather than the wish to endure it. 

At last he disassembles the bones, the lunate and triqueturm, the metacarpals, the distal and proximal phalanges. He sorts them by size and lines them up beside his nails on the worktable in front of him, working one-handed because his other hand has been broken down and set aside to be studied and then discarded. Now the real work begins, the fun work, the work of construction. He doesn't waste time perfecting the osseointegration of bone and implant, because soon enough he'll be nothing but implant. He doesn't fine-tune the artificial nerves; his new hand is wireless. 

As he pieces together parts, he lets his imagination catapult him to the next step, and the next step, and the step after that. He imagines having a body that is modular, easily repaired or upgraded. He imagines having eyes that never tire and breath that never draws short. He imagines having the mind of a petascale computer and the heart of a super-soldier. This is Iron Man, beatified—Tony Stark 3.0, no longer really Tony Stark at all.

Sometimes, though, the dream becomes a nightmare, a worse kind of What If. He imagines a broad hand reaching out to clasp him, fingers that wrap so softly around his forearm that a pure electric jolt of pleasure runs from his shoulder down to the severed end of his wrist. Steve slides his hand down, and what Tony cut away reassembles itself under the sweep of Steve's palm. By the time Steve's fingers tangle with Tony's own, it's like he never upgraded his hand at all, it's like a benediction that undoes all his hard work and denies him the opportunity for contrition, to be better and do better. He wants it so much. He wants that clean dry mechanical body the way a man in the desert with his mouth baked shut wants water. He wants that warm, golden void filled only with capability and intention. He wants. Is there any state that leads to more catastrophic ends?

What people neglect when they talk about alcoholism is the genetic component. He doesn't use that as an excuse for his own personal shortcomings; but perhaps it offers an explanation for how easily he slid into it, how covertly but thoroughly the addiction took over his life. It took him out of his head. If there's one place Tony Stark has always been desperate to go, it's out of his head. 

Presumably there is a long line of Stark men marching back into the paleolithic with rocks glasses and decanters and snifters and tankards and chalices and skins of liquor caught in their hands. Presumably Tony is just one more cog in that grand machine of weakness. He can't say. Howard Stark was an alcoholic, and Tony Stark is an alcoholic, and any children he has might be alcoholics, which is one reason but not the only reason he'll never be a father.

That's a lie. This is just one long line of excuses. He builds a symphony of justification. The first movement goes like this:

Tony was eight when his father first poured him a single-malt bourbon and told him it would put hair on his chest. He was eight and he chugged it down like chocolate milk. It hit him hard and fast, his body too small to metabolize the ethanol, but it was worth fighting against his gag reflex for the granite approval on his father's face. He'd have drunk the whole bottle. He'd have drunk the whole cabinet. He'd have drunk until he vomited and seized and became cyanotic. It hit him hard and fast, that golden glow, and that's how he knows he was born an addict; what eight year old swigs bourbon like water?

What people neglect when they talk about Howard Stark is his strength of character. He called Tony names: weak and wimp, sissy, soft, pansy and pussy and momma's boy. None of the names were inaccurate. Howard Stark was a hard man in a hard world, and he did his best to make sure his son was hard, too. It's how you survive. It's how Tony survived. He wouldn't be alive today, if not for the strength of character his father passed down like commandments. You get tough. You have grit. You make yourself into a man. That's how he knows his father loved him.

But sometimes he wonders—

Did his father _know?_ Tony was always careful, he'd been so careful, he'd never looked twice at another boy because when you like girls too it's easier to like girls. Even if you fucked a man, you didn't fall in love with him, because… he used to know the answer. You didn't fall in love with another man, because real men didn't. That craven, hot shame that rose from his father looking at him and _knowing_ despite any evidence whatsoever—just another comorbid condition, just one more thing to excise from Tony Stark 3.0. Now he has no problem with the reality of it. Of course he doesn't. He could fuck a man if he wanted. He could fall in love with a man if he wanted. He could fall in love with a man if he didn't want, could find himself in a one-sided love story without his consent. 

But how did his father _know_? Was his deficiency so obvious it was written across his face at eight and seven and four? How could he hide it, when it was that plain? How could he purge it? What was so wrong with him, that even as a child people could tell—

He knows better now, of course. He could fuck men. He has fucked men. Tony Stark is shameless. Tony Stark even fell in love with a man. It's good. It's fine. He won't have those qualities much longer, but their removal is incidental, a consequence of extracting dopamine and oxytocin from the messy soup of his brain.

"Do you really think that's going to work, Tony?" Steve says. There's a body laid out on the slab between them.

"No," Tony says, because he can be honest with Steve if no one else. In the end, it's almost the only thing he can do for Steve. In the end, Steve thought he deserved to die, and Tony can do that, too, but right now there's this, the body, the pursuit, the job. He has to take responsibility.

"I'm not talking about this mess," Steve says. "You know what I'm talking about."

"No," Tony says.

"What am I talking about, Tony?"

"Please," Tony says. "Don't make me say it."

"What am I talking about, Tony?"

Tony looks away, not at the body and not at Steve. "How much I love you," he says.

"How much you love me," Steve says. "That's right."

A hot curdle of humiliation the likes of which he hasn't felt since Steve was shot to death blooms in Tony's gut. He's humiliated, he's always humiliated, when he thinks about this. He deserves to feel humiliated.

"What did you think would happen?" Steve asks. "Did you think that someday you'd confess and be forgiven? That I'd been in love with you all along and too cowardly to admit it?"

Tony has killed men, he has broken laws, he has assassinated the leaders of alien races, he has lied and betrayed and rotted every relationship that ever mattered, he has puked all down the front of his shirt and not even bothered to clean himself up, he's been such a spineless sack of shit that he sat down in the snow to die rather than taking responsibility; but nothing has ever made him feel ashamed the way this makes him feel ashamed.

"No," he protests. "I never thought that."

"Maybe not," Steve says. "But you hoped for it, didn't you? How abnormal do you have to be, Tony, to think there was even a sliver of a chance that I felt the way about you that you feel about me?"

Tony feels like his skin's going to dissolve and leave him naked. No—he feels like the armor's going to dissolve and leave him naked. There's no longer much of a difference. He turns away from Steve because he's always turning away from Steve and focuses instead on the body laid out on the table. Six foot, one ninety-five, possessed of the ability to light herself on fire (an astonishingly common gift) if not with the blistering power of Johnny Storm. She'd gone missing three months ago and had only turned up recently, dying but not dead, in a farm field in Iowa. The hospital had contacted the police, and the police had contacted SHIELD, and by the time Tony got to the hospital the woman was dead. Her lips had been burned off, which should have been an impossibility. And now she's laid out here, on this slab of a table, for Tony to disassemble.

There used to be a different body on this table, but that body is gone if not laid to rest.

"Have you ever been enough, Tony?" Steve asks. "What you are, what you do, who you choose to be—has that ever been enough for anyone?"

Tony pulls up the autopsy results. He didn't have to be here, could have accessed the reports from anywhere, but he wanted to see it with his own eyes, the eyes he built himself. Compared to the medical records pulled from the Registry, Messner-comma-Georgia has obviously and dramatically been altered on a molecular level. The hallmarks are all there. Gene therapy, or, or magic—something changed her, bloomed for a brief moment into power far beyond the ability to flick her finger and light a fire, and then it ate her alive.

"Have you, Tony?" Steve wants to know.

"No," Tony mumbles. 

"No," Steve says. "No. You've never been enough."

The worst part is that no matter how hard Tony tries to keep his attention on Messner-comma-Georgia's blackened skin, Steve sits like a gravity well on the edge of his vision. He's never not wanted to look at Steve, even when Steve hated him, even when Steve was beating him to death. He can't fight that instinct, and so he looks up, and so he sees the expression of mocking, condescending pity that sits on Steve's face. What a fair-skinned blue-eyed boy Steve is. Jesus, he's a handsome man. When he plants his feet, not even the heaving earth can make him move; that's the strength of his conviction.

"Do you really think I could love you, Tony?" Steve says, and oh how Tony wants, in that one moment he feels every moment of every hour of every month of every year of yearning, all the sweet bitter aching devotion he's ever felt for Steve, all the hopeless desperate hunger that he packed down deep.

Did he ever believe Steve could love him? 

"No," he says.

"No," Steve agrees. "Of course not."

Now that he's let himself look, he can't stop looking. It's been months, it feels like years, his mind can't stop superimposing that last final shot of Steve's slack, pale face over his flushed cheeks and wheat-fine eyelashes now. Even the cruel twist of a mouth made more generous by familiarity is stunning. Tony never thinks about taking Steve apart, about disassembling him into his component parts for study; Tony wants Steve as he is, whole and entire.

"God I miss you," he says, and Steve smirks and answers, "Do you really?" and that's the moment when Tony becomes aware that someone is on the other side of the door.

"Director?" the person calls.

Tony jerks. It probably isn't visible from the outside; probably the armor absorbs it. 

"Agent Gomez," he says. Flat, monotone. Not at all the way he was speaking to Steve.

"Sir." There's a fraction of a second of hesitation during which Tony can imagine Gomez gathering his nerve, and then the guy says, "Anything I can help with?"

"No," Tony says, and he checks the locks on the hatch and watches through the security cameras as Gomez trots around the corner and confers with a familiar man in a suit. The whole time he can feel Steve's eyes on him, can feel Steve looking at him—and it's like he's stripped of his armor, it's like Steve rather than Tony has cut Tony apart to see how he ticks, it's like he's being vivisected by a man who doesn't care for what he sees at all.

* * *

In the footage, Tony takes his helmet off. He cradles it in his hands, between his knees, as he sits. The sheer blank eyepieces stare back at him, and it's one of those moments, one of those for-the-eye-sees-not-itself moments, which Tony has subverted by in some sense manufacturing himself new eyes. He can't think, can't find the words. What can you say when your heart lies unbeating on the table beside you? He's had artificial hearts before, he'll be just fine. That's something he can think about—taking his body apart. He thinks about putting something more useful in his chest, something that functions flawlessly, something that works perpetually without dismay or anguish. He thinks about his ribcage, the smooth curve of white bone, how absolutely intact the white bone is. There's no scarring there, no wound, no hole-punch circle that blew out his spine. He thinks about internality. He thinks about the blind universe. He thinks about taking his body apart. Eventually, Tony thinks of everything.

* * *

DAEDALUS: You really think we're that close?

BOWMAN: We've explored other options. This makes the most sense for widespread release. We can pursue more tailored applications later.

DAEDALUS: A standardized version? What's in it?

BOWMAN: What you'd expect. Resistance to a number of diseases, fixes for more common debilitating factors—poor eyesight, for instance, and dementia.

DAEDALUS: Will they live through that?

BOWMAN: We exist on the cusp of extinction. No one talks about that. A few decades ago, the question was whether we would survive long enough to fling ourselves out among the stars although we had no example of another species doing so. Now we know that alien races exist, but where are our colonies? Why are we not living on the moon, or Mars, or on some distant habitable planet? If something happens to Earth, we're screwed.

DAEDALUS: And you think this will improve our chances of survival. 

BOWMAN: I believe it could be a contributing factor, yes. It's a first step.

DAEDALUS: Your version of the long view accounts for centuries of progress—

BOWMAN: Millennia. 

DAEDALUS: They won't love you for it.

BOWMAN: I don't care about that. It's enough that they survive. In the meantime, we can alleviate suffering on a massive scale.

DAEDALUS: I'm guessing you never lost sleep over the trolley problem.

BOWMAN: Of course not. 

DAEDALUS: And you're committed to airborne distribution?

BOWMAN: You can't beat the east coast for population density.

* * *

CLASSIFIED INTERNAL MEMO  
FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY

I needn't tell you that this is going to look bad especially in light of losing Hill. The instability we're projecting is going to make recovery difficult. It appears instability is the central issue here on a number of levels. We need to play this by the books and tap as many credible witnesses as possible.

Regarding our other project: this could also be a solid step towards ensuring its completion. The data we've mined is by itself priceless. In fact, I consider the application secondary to this new information. A competent lawyer will have no trouble convincing a jury that everything we've done here is completely legal, which of course it is now even if it wasn't when we started. 

Best of luck,

[REDACTED]

* * *

Tony plays What If the way some people play chess: to sharpen his instincts, inure him to his flaws, and develop his ability to value strategy over sentiment. In older days he used it as a catharsis, the sort of emotional release he denied himself in the real world because Tony's real-world releases tended to be messy and involve far too much fallout. Now he doesn't drink, doesn't dream, doesn't waste time building castles in the air. It's locked down. He's in control. He's taking responsibility.

"What's on your mind?" Friday asks.

"A piece of work to make sick men whole," Tony answers.

"Thought it was the other way around," Friday says. Today Friday is played by Norma Jeane Mortensen, herself a badly-misunderstood addict unable to orchestrate the performance of her own life. She and Tony, they're both bombshells, they're both tick-tick-ticking away until the grand swell of the finale.

"Some whole that we must make sick?" he says.

"Somethin' like that," Friday agrees. "Has it occurred to you that you're fixating on the cornfield kidnappings to distract yourself from bigger problems?"

"The cornfield kidnappings? Is that what they're calling them?" Tony says, and then, "Of course it's occurred to me."

"Not that the media's paid much attention. And far be it for me to suggest you stop fixating." 

"There has to be a common thread," he says, and then pulls a face inside the armor. It's the first time he's been aware of having a face in weeks. "There _are_ common threads."

"They're all metahumans or parahumans," Friday says. "Are you going to let them in?"

"Georgia Messner never left her state."

"Low-profile," Friday says. "Heroes, but nobody you'd immediately notice was missin'." Her holographic self takes a turn around the table and stops to gaze at the body laid out there. There's nothing coquettish about her posture, which instead suggests the bearing of a field marshal. She ignores the muffled thumping coming from the other side of the hatch.

"They aren't dumping bodies."

"We don't know that they aren't dumping bodies." She's too smart for his own good. Maybe this is what a father feels, when he looks at his child and sees how far beyond him they've grown. It's pride, maybe, or a sort of awe that is not untainted by wry resignation. Tony wouldn't know. Fatherhood is a state that escapes him.

He's tired. He's so tired, but he doesn't sleep anymore, doesn't need to sleep. Sleep is an outdated function. Tony is something new, something better, he can be better, he does better, he takes responsibility. Tick-tick-tick-boom. He has to take responsibility, because he's finding it increasingly difficult to remember why he cares about all of it or about any of it. The universe is vast and immense and dying a slow heat-death and humans think they're impressive for having lasted as long as a sneeze and did it really matter? Steve thought it mattered. What if Steve was wrong? 

"So far the only bodies we've found are people who escaped," Tony corrects. "And we can assume that the kidnapper is using those people as test subjects."

"Or torture victims," Friday agrees. "Not much of a difference in this case."

"But how did they find her?" Tony says. As long as he keeps tick-tick-ticking along at the surface—that's what matters. He doesn't have to have substance as long as he has the performance of substance. He can while away the hours doing whatever he likes in the sanctity of his own head as long as he keeps tick-tick-ticking.

"How did they find any of them?" Friday counters. "We both know this isn't random."

Someone's shouting on the other side of the bulkhead. It probably isn't real. What's real is Georgia Messner, six foot even, laid out on this table like a pharoah. Somebody put a metaphorical needle in her very real vein and shot her full of a substance that lit her up like a Roman candle, that ate her alive from the inside out. Somebody hurt her. Tony can care about that.

"Are you going to let them in?" Friday wonders.

"There's something. It's right there. It feels familiar." Tony can taste it on the tip of his tongue. There's a state he can reach under certain conditions of deprivation, a state that sits on the tip of his tongue like grace and arcs connections like lightning. He remembers that state of grace the way a man standing at the bottom of a black oubliette remembers a distant slice of sky. Maybe he's too comfortable here. Maybe he isn't hurting enough. "Someone changed her on a cellular level," he says. "Someone tried to overwrite her," he says, "someone tried to _elevate_ her."

"Are you going to let them in?" Friday asks.

It's right there, on the tip of his tongue, but the connection isn't coming. He has all the pieces but none of the insight required to string them together. Steve stares back at him, impassive; there's the clarity he requires. Meanwhile Tony is carrying the kind of tiredness that leeches meaning and color from the world around him. He no longer has the energy to censure himself for wanting to sleep. He just wants to be done. Is that so much to ask?

Steve stares back at him. Steve is everything that Tony Stark isn't: a hero stripped of weakness, of limitation and doubt. Steve is something better, something more, Steve is everything that Tony Stark aspires to be. He's dead right there in the corner. He watches Tony with blue blue eyes, and Tony watches back with blue blue eyes of his own. Jesus aren't they handsome men, these two blue-eyed boys.

Tony isn't crazy. He knows. He knows. He _knows._

* * *

If you watched the footage, you'd see Tony take his helmet off. You'd see him try not to breathe, try not to think, because thinking is what got him here. Thinking is the root of this whole fucking mess. Knowledge is the bait for the trap of the cage that he built himself. It's the anchor. It's the chain. And now he's stuck with the memory of something that used to blaze in his chest: a star made dense by grief and forewarning, a supernova collapse fueled by despair that crushes itself into nothing, nothing, nothing. He's left with nothing when that fuel runs out. There's a dense, black knot that sits behind the bone curve of his ribs which act as an event horizon beyond which no light can escape. 

The shield is on the table beside him. So impossible does the current state of the universe seem that Tony half-expects the chest beneath that shield to be heaving as it sucks in oxygen to pump through the great heart that should by all measures of goodness still be beating.

* * *

They crack the hatch while he's still staring at Steve. Tony doesn't resist. It's not worth the effort.

* * *

8470297.1.40.209  
PASSIVE MODE //

JK: Tony.

TS: Jack.

JK: Do you know why you're here?

TS: I can guess.

JK: And your guesses are pretty damn good, am I right?

TS: You'd be surprised.

JK: Maybe. Anyway, we're temporarily relieving you of your position, medical assessment pending. I have all the paperwork from the CSA and the DOD right here.

TS: Are you going to tell me why?

JK: Come on, Tony.

TS: Are you going to tell me why?

JK: Do you really want to get into that? It's all here in the paperwork.

TS: I could go public with this.

JK: What do you think you'd accomplish? We might be embarrassed, losing two directors in a matter of months, but you're already the man who murdered Captain America. And hey, this way you might actually get your job back.

TS: Wonderful.

JK: This is a time of transition. We're bringing in some new advisors, some guys who can give us outside opinions. In the meantime all you have to do is sit tight while we handle the situation.

TS: Me. You mean handle me.

JK: I didn't say that.

TS: I'm in the middle of an important investigation—

JK: The cornfield kidnappings? That's part of the problem. 

TS: Why would—

JK: It's just another symptom, Tony. A couple of kidnappings aren't worth the time or, quite frankly, the taxpayer dollars you're spending to look into them. This is a good thing. Take a vacation, get a massage. Work off the stress. You'll come back with a clear mind.

TS: Fine.

JK: That's it? I expected more of a fight. Glad you're being reasonable.

TS: I'm always reasonable. Sometimes I could choke on how reasonable I am.

JK: See, that's what I mean. You need some time to get out of your own head. I hear the Grenadines are nice.

TS: Did Samson have anything to do with this?

JK: Who?

TS: Don't play dumb, Jack. I know you were watching me.

JK: Tony. You're the Director of SHIELD. Of course we have a vested interest in your health. If Doctor Samson made any recommendations, I can assure you he did so out of concern for your wellbeing.

TS: That's the one thing out of this whole mess I can believe. 

JK: I am sorry, Tony. For what it's worth. 

TS: I get the picture. Call me when I'm out of the doghouse.

JK: There's just one more thing, actually.

TS: What?

JK: We're asking you to surrender the armor.

TS: Excuse me?

JK: Temporary lockdown only, Tony. Until we're sure you don't pose a danger to yourself. We won't be able to access it, and you get to supervise the whole process.

TS: You can't lock the armor down.

JK: If you allow us to, we can.

TS: I am the armor. 

JK: Ah, right. Extremis. We have a solution for that. If you don't mind coming out of your shell… 

TS: You think you can make me?

JK: I'm hoping I won't have to, but if you resist, I will remind you that you trained Alpha Team yourself. Don't make this harder than it has to be.

* * *

They crack his armor, and Tony doesn't resist; it's not worth the effort, it's not worth the effort to break through the ice of the paralysis that overwhelms him. What happens is that he cracks the armor for them.

When it's all over, he becomes first aware of exposure. The whisper of air against the soft skin of his cheek is like a slow tender graze from the fingers of someone beloved. A yoke sits oddly over his shoulders, constricting, tight and then lose and then tight again as he shifts: a shirt, a jacket. There are shoes and socks on the other side of the room. His feet are bare against the floor, his toes fragile and alien. The watchword is vulnerable.

Back when he still slept, Tony used to have this dream. It started like this; he can't remember if it was a nightmare. All he has to do is tip backwards and sink into the bed, which would catch his body as he sank into it and support him against the firm even pressure of gravity pulling him down, and he could find out. All he has to do is tip backwards and let himself fall until his body goes lose and heavy and then he could close his eyelids and maybe he wouldn't even dream. He can't remember if in the dream he was dreaming; all his nightmares are in the waking world.

It would be so easy.

All he has to do is fall.

It would be so easy.

He builds a What If. In his What If, all he has to do is fall back and close his eyes to be rid of the need to concern himself with how easily his unprotected skin could rupture if someone touched him. All he has to do is close his eyes. He could go so gently. No one would condemn him or damn him, no one would disassemble him, no one would yell at him or shoot at him or try to beat him to death. No one would notice. It wouldn't hurt at all. Tony's belief in the afterlife is abstract and concerns itself with legacy, with innovation, and with impact, so in the What If, he doesn't go anywhere, he just falls back and closes his eyes, he just fades, because even if he believed in an afterlife there are no reunions for a man who has yet to free himself from human sin. The idea that he would end up in the same place as Steve strains credulity even in fantasy—but Tony doesn't believe in an afterlife unless you consider the eventual repurposing of his matter an afterlife, so none of it matters.

In the What If, Tony falls asleep. In the What Is, the consequence of sleeping is having to wake up. He's trying to take responsibility, but he can't be responsible for that consequence, for the consequence of having to wake up and find himself still trapped in this terrible new world without even the sanctuary of the armor to keep him separate.

He drags his attention back together and looks down. Around his ankle rests a cuff.

"Boss?" Friday says. Her voice is coming from a speaker across the room, because she can no longer whisper in his ear. That intimacy has been stripped from them.

"Where are—"

"The tower," Friday says.

The tower. His tower, for the Avengers.

"How did we get here? Did they... drug me, or knock me out—"

"Boss," Friday says. "Tony. I think you might be dissociating." Her lilting voice swallows the final consonant: _dissociatin'._

What he can't stop thinking about is how he told them yes.

There's a cosmological mystery called the lithium problem. It concerns itself with the early moments of the universe: the nucleosynthesis of the first elements other than the lightest form of hydrogen. All the current models of the big bang correctly predict how much deuterium and helium-3 and helium-4 were born in that infancy; there's no gap between what is calculated and what is observed. But what of the lithium? Based on those otherwise correct models, there should be three or four times more than there actually is; and while the scientific community has put forth an entire hymnal of proposed solutions including several likely candidates that cite dark matter, no one has really ever satisfactorily explained where all that natal lithium went.

They'd asked him to take his armor off, and he'd told them yes and then held still without struggling as they stripped him. He didn't fight. It was an entirely consensual encounter. Nobody can remove the armor without Tony's consent.

Of course, after all that primordial nucleosynthesis came the dazzling part, the stellar nucleosynthesis that produced the fun heavy elements: carbon, neon, oxygen, silicon. All those luminous stars still tick-tick-ticking away in the heavens are actually crushing themselves heavier and heavier as they blaze. The biggest stars, the ones that explode into supernovas before they collapse, produce iron.

Before they stripped the armor, one soldier on either side of Tony had stretched each arm out and pinned it in place like you might pin a beetle to a mounting board. The soldiers had both been members of Alpha Team equipped with powered suits of their own that were far less sophisticated but still adequately strong to restrain the Iron Man when it wasn't struggling. His belly was exposed, his vulnerable underside left open; they spread his arms and then Agent Carstairs requested in solemn recitation each of the external suit devices. "Let's have the gauntlets first," he'd said, and Tony shucked the gauntlets like you'd shuck a corncob or a fingernail, and two more soldiers of the many in the room took the gauntlets and laid them out on the floor in neat parallel lines where they were left discarded for someone else to pick over.

Iron is the last and heaviest element produced before supernovas collapse into black holes or neutron stars or into nothing at all. Iron is that final gasping breath, a heavy ghost disassembled into discrete particles and scattered among the stars.

Tony's palms are broad and calloused, his arms hard with lean muscle, but his wrists have always been too delicate to belong to a man who doesn't flinch. When they had taken his gauntlets, the soldiers' hands were around his wrists. They hadn't touched his skin, because he still wore the undersheath with its golden lattice of peptide chains, but he'd felt the pressure of their fingers like manacles nonetheless.

"Sir," Agent Gomez had asked, "is this okay?" And Tony, as reassuring as he could possibly be from the cold remove of the ice beneath which he shook, had said yes.

"The vambraces next," Carstairs had said, and then, "The pauldrons, the cuirass." He'd probably used different words; those were Tony's names for his gleaming full plate. "Now the helmet," Carstairs said, and Tony had popped the seal and bowed his head so they could take it off him.

Finally they had torn away the armor from his waist down, waiting for Tony to relax each piece into their hands as their fingers ran along the knobs of his ankles and the creases behind his knees and the soft insides of his thighs. He could still feel each part in his head, the connection made possible by Extremis so seamless it was like he still wore the Iron Man even as they yanked off his greaves and boots. He had put the armor on lockdown before, once upon a time when a kid named Mordred had found a backdoor into Tony's brain and used him like a weapon; as a preventative, Tony had shut the armor away from himself and set Friday to watch it. This was nothing like that. They weren't inside him. He could feel each piece of the armor as they'd grasped it and peeled it off. He still wore the undersheath. 

By mass iron is one of the most common elements on the planet. Small wonder that the world changed when humans learned to master it, to pull it from the earth and smelt it and beat it into tools. There's a mysticism there that Tony appreciates; small wonder that iron showed up in folklore. Cold iron, that was for keeping away the fairies, and horseshoes were for luck, and iron fences around graveyards kept the ghosts inside. He could use an iron fence of his own when he's this close to leaking out his own body like a soul in a cartoon—extracted in a cloud of cold vapor through his nose and mouth because they took away the iron that kept him inside.

And then he'd had only the golden mail of the undersuit to keep him from being naked before them. There were so many people in the room, and they were all watching him, and he was sure he wasn't shaking because he'd coded that response out of himself, but they were all watching, because he'd said yes. "Do you have it?" Carstairs had asked, and then Agent Colletti, whose partner Tony had once met over dinner back when he still ate dinner, held up a gleaming golden circlet. "Right here," he'd said, and then he knelt in front of Tony.

Iron was fine, but what happened to all the lithium?

For one hysterical moment, Tony had thought he was meant to knight the kid. He didn't have a sword, though, and they had stripped his authority and laid it out on the floor, so he couldn't grant any titles that day. What had finally cut through his remove was the almost inaudible clink of the circlet closing around his ankle. The consequence of that clink was having his brain stem pulled out the back of his skull.

The thing that made lithium useful even beyond its medical value was its application in batteries. You could make disposable batteries with metallic lithium, or rechargeable batteries from lithium-ion. There isn't nearly as much lithium on Earth as there is iron, which was going to be a problem eventually but wouldn't a problem in Tony's lifetime. He still worries about it, though; someone has to.

Sometimes he gets a thought in his head that he just—can't—let—go—

Lithium; or how he said yes.

When they'd put that circlet around his ankle, the world had dropped out from under him. His connection to the armor: gone. Friday, whispering in his ear: gone. That massive net of datastreams: gone.

The undersuit: gone.

The soldiers still had their hands tight around his wrists.

The undersuit: gone.

The soldiers had still had their hands around his wrists, but now they touched skin rather than a flawless golden lattice. They were touching his skin. Nobody had touched Tony since Steve Rogers tried (first with his shield and then with his bare hands) to beat Tony to death in the middle of a Manhattan street. Having someone else erase that last touch is profane, it's disturbing. It makes Tony dirty. The last person to touch Tony had been Steve and now these strangers had come along to touch him instead, and what should make Tony angry only makes him feel washed away and vacant. Of course they'd take this from him. Of course they'd leave him naked and sagging in front of his own men. Of course he couldn't keep that perfect last touch, Steve's final gift to him, the sort of gift that was beautiful and useful and so exquisite it hurt like a blow to the head. He'd folded it gently into memory, but now that's been ripped from him, too.

At some point they must have found him clothes.

At some point they must have taken him back to his tower.

At some point Igraine always goes back in the tower.

No—it's more true to say that some part of Igraine is always trapped in Tintagel, stuck on the eve of defeat and deceit. Tony is supposed to be a king, a knight-errant, a heroic figure in gleaming plate, but instead he's stuck here in this tower under siege from every side.

He'd gone to Tintagel once on a pilgrimage to Cornwall. The castle was ruined and ravaged and not much more than a handful of low stone walls that only suggested at what must have once been a daunting structure set on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. At the time he'd wondered if Igraine ever felt anchored to the sea, if she'd missed it when Uther carried her off to Camelot. Could her chain stretch that far? He thought it could. She had Gorlois to hold her there, and her daughters, a whole life before Uther ripped her away.

There's a certain state Tony can reach under the right conditions: a luminous state that almost approaches grace. Pain is a crucible that purifies him until all that remains is the kind of clarity known only to mystics, the kind that lets him hear the signal in the noise. Trauma is not something to be endured but rather something to be embraced as the genesis of revelation. So let his heart be carved away, let his armor be taken, let all those deaths sit heavy on his shoulders: Tony not only can but needs to suffer. He deserves it. Doesn't he deserve to be brilliant?

He comes back to his senses in stages. Touch first, that's the pressure of his feet flat against the rug and the hard edge of the bedframe at his back (when did he crumple to the floor?), and then smell, the linen scent of bedding and crisp edge of recycled air. Taste: his mouth baked dry. Vision: the floaters from pressing his palms into his eye sockets. And finally hearing: Friday's voice murmuring a count to which his breath is synchronized.

"Friday," he says.

"Boss? Are you back with me?"

"Yeah, I'm back," he says. "I need you to do me a favor. I need you to find Maya Hansen."

* * *

DAEDALUS: That little side project of yours turned out to be pretty important.

BOWMAN: Not important. Useful, maybe. I doubt anyone else has enough pieces to finish the puzzle. 

DAEDALUS: Never let it be said that you were inefficient.

BOWMAN: Why waste resources?

DAEDALUS: Are you really ready to pull the trigger?

BOWMAN: Don't make it sound like an act of brutality. I'm elevating us.

DAEDALUS: Paving the way to a brighter tomorrow.

BOWMAN: Something like that.

DAEDALUS: Sorry, I didn't mean to be trite. We really are on the cusp of something incredible.

BOWMAN: Yes.

DAEDALUS: They're going to hate you, you know. Paint you as a villain.

BOWMAN: I have no trouble embracing that image. Ha. Maybe I should adopt an alias. 

DAEDALUS: Like the Mandarin? Isn't he dead now?

BOWMAN: He is. 

DAEDALUS: What would you call yourself?

BOWMAN: Something to-the-point, I think. 

DAEDALUS: You could be the Futurist.

* * *

Now it's all logistics, and Tony excels at logistics. For him the paramount concern will always be application, not _what_ or _why_ but _how_. He lives in that liminal space where thought translates to reality; give him a problem, and his shoulders are broad enough to move the world.

"SHIELD has eyes on us?" he asks.

Friday, speaking from his phone: "Do I really have to answer that?"

"No," Tony says, "don't answer that." He shoves one dangling earbud in his ear as he hops into his socks. "Not even the stealth suit?"

Friday pauses, and in that pause Tony reads her pleasure at having her own told-you-so moment. "Unfortunately," she says, "unfortunately, it seems like the former Director of SHIELD saw fit to upgrade SHIELD's equipment to better detect advanced camouflage. For instance, the sort of stealth capability built into every iteration of your armor other than the most recent."

"What a short-sighted idiot," Tony says, and that's how he ends up preparing to sneak out of his own building to LaGuardia at two in the morning.

Friday rides along in his pocket, still managing to whisper in his ear because his own deficiencies are counteracted by her grace. "Should I contact anyone?" she asks, and Tony says no. Who would he even contact? Who would believe him? All he wants is to crawl back into his coffin, but instead he's out here taking responsibility.

Socks and shoes accomplished, he collects a hat and then upon second thought retreats back to the bathroom to shave. Without the cover of facial hair, he almost doesn't recognize himself. He can't remember the last time he met his own eyes in a mirror. He can't remember the last time he _looked_ in a mirror. 

And last, he opens the door to Steve's room.

He waits there in the hallway for a moment, caught in the doorway, but Steve isn't waiting inside, so he enters, goes to Steve's desk, ignores Steve's sketches, and removes the print hanging on the wall. There's a small safe hidden behind it, and since Steve never came back here after launching his little revolution-and-rebellion act, Tony probably still knows the passcode. Six hours ago he'd have been able to trigger the electronic lock to open with merely a touch, but now—

"What are you lookin' for?" Friday asks. There are no cameras in the bedrooms, so she doesn't have eyes on him.

There was a time when Tony bled for his art, first red and then gold, and the lightest touch of his armor would have popped that lock like a shell shucked from a shotgun. There was a time when the merest thought would have summoned all the information he needed—Maya's whereabouts, SHIELD's surveillance net—there was a time when Tony wouldn't have had to leave Tintagel at all, because his merest thought could affect change from ten thousand miles away. Igraine never had that failsafe, but Tony's life is an elaborate nesting doll of failsafes. He stacks one failure inside of another.

Once upon a time, Tony bled for his art, first red and then gold. Now he's necrotic—fluidless and brittle. He doesn't bleed. Dead men don't. And worst of all, they've pulled him out of his coffin, so he's left without a way to lock all the rot away. 

He could take his rot and go lie down on Steve's bed, though. Tony lives a twilight existence in which he does not need sleep, and that's by design; but he imagines a What If where he does sleep, a What If where he and his rot could crawl into Steve's bed and sleep until the end of the universe. Tony can't think of any place he would rather sleep than Steve's bed. It feels like some gross perversion of the care Steve once took with him, but Tony killed Steve, and in the face of murder one pathetic indulgence shouldn't seem like a violation even if it feels like a violation in his gut where shame sits.

"Boss?" Friday says.

"Hang on," Tony says, and then he punches in the code. The lock pops, and the safe swings open.

He knows what he's looking for, because Steve had showed him this before. The idea was something he'd expect from Natasha, and for all he knew Natasha had helped with the execution; but Steve one evening had pulled him aside, showed him the safe, showed him the lock, showed him what was inside. "There's two sets for you," he'd said. "I'd like at least one set for everyone, but I had yours done first."

Tony had teased back, said something about… about… something about how he could sit down at a computer and within thirty seconds have a falsified identity. "You might not always have a computer," Steve had countered, and then he'd gently knocked his fingers against the top of Tony's skull. "Gotta keep you safe, Shellhead."

That was before Steve decided Tony deserved to die, but the papers are all still there: driver licenses, passports, credit cards. Steve had even had the foresight to use less iconic photos of Tony, which means one driver's license bears a picture of him with scruff almost thick enough to call a beard, surely taken after three or four weeks locked in his garage to work on a new project; and the other has a photo captured during one of his rare periods with no facial hair. That Tony's cheeks are flushed, his eyes bright, his laughter barely contained; if you hadn't lived inside him, you would've thought him free from sin.

He takes the first set and leaves the second. Nobody will be looking at his face anyway.

* * *

DAEDALUS: The warheads are ready to launch. 

BOWMAN: Good.

DAEDALUS: I can't believe how fast this is coming together. Or that we had enough funding to pull this off.

BOWMAN: You know I sold this as a project with military applications.

DAEDALUS: A super-soldier biological compiler. I remember. 

BOWMAN: I don't see why I shouldn't take advantage of how small their imaginations are. We're going to be criminals anyway. I have no problem fleecing the government out of millions of dollars.

DAEDALUS: Some people are still going to die. Even after all those trials on superhumans…. 

BOWMAN: They're more robust and therefore more likely to survive the transition. You can't harvest as much useful information from a corpse. And there's a greater variety in profile composition, too. Soon we'll be able to replicate all those abilities.

DAEDALUS: Right.

BOWMAN: Don't tell me you're having second thoughts.

DAEDALUS: Of course not. Just thinking about how close we are.

BOWMAN: As long as you don't get distracted planning your escape to the Grenadines.

DAEDALUS: I could use a vacation. What about you?

BOWMAN: What about me?

DAEDALUS: What are you going to do when we're done?

BOWMAN: Chug a bottle of Jack and get back to work.

* * *

He can't sleep on the plane. He can't even have Friday, at least during liftoff, although once they're in the air he slips his earbud back in his ear and slumps against his armrest. Having a window seat almost makes up for the indignity of being forced to sit in coach.

"What's your plan here, boss?" Friday wants to know.

Tony answers by typing into his phone so he doesn't give someone the right impression that he's crazy. DON'T HAVE ONE.

"I find that hard to believe."

WHY DON'T YOU COME UP WITH SOMETHING.

"All I'm sayin' is that it isn't like you. Rushing in, no plan, no backup—well, maybe that last one isn't as surprising."

HA HA.

"You don't think you should…"

I HAVE TO GET THERE.

"And do what? Not seein' how this is so urgent we can't take the time to find help."

WE DON'T HAVE TIME.

"How do you know?"

I KNOW.

"You aren't thinking clearly." 

AT LEAST I'M THINKING.

"And after we get you there?"

I'LL FIGURE IT OUT AS I GO.

"Okay," Friday says. "Then let me tell you what I've found."

* * *

This is the story of Extremis.

Once upon a time there was a bright drunk girl and a bright drunk boy, and they each recognized in the other something of themselves. They studied under the same wise old master, and when he wasn't trying to push psilocybin mushrooms he was a pretty good guy. He believed in his students, he believed they could change the world, he believed they would test-pilot humanity right into the future.

The boy and the girl had been like siblings, although sometimes they'd fought, and sometimes they fucked because it was convenient, and sometimes they shared a bottle of whiskey while they pulled apart the universe. Do you know how rare that kind of meeting of the minds is? Out of seven billion people, maybe forty are genuinely Tony's intellectual peers. Maybe only twenty. Maybe only ten. The sex had been fine, but it was never as good as the conversation. 

They went their separate ways eventually—Maya to coax and bully funding out of the military and the corporate world, and Tony to take the throne that had been awarded to him at birth. Tony built a better suit. Maya punched biology in the face until she built a better super-soldier. And then… 

The funding started to run out.

What Maya said when she came to Tony was that someone had _stolen her life's work_. Calling it a super-soldier solution wildly obfuscated the power and flexibility of her enhancile, of course; when she mastered it, Extremis could be a cure for cancer, for dementia, it would be a way to make humans durable enough to survive on Mars, it had the potential to level the playing field between _homo sapiens_ and _homo superior._

Extremis was, essentially, robotic microsurgery: a nanite package delivered via direct injection into the bloodstream that interacted with the central nervous system. After the injection, you scabbed over. That didn't describe the horror. Your _entire body_ became a scab, became covered in crusted blood and shed skin. Under ideal circumstances, you'd have a fluid drip and someone to monitor you while your wetware overwrote itself. Under other circumstances, you crossed your fingers and hoped you didn't die. The mortality rate even under good circumstances was staggering: a terminal stress-test.

It worked by overwriting the body's repair center with a new blueprint. That was what you customized: you could tell your body it was supposed to fix your hands so they had six fingers, or your immune system so perfume didn't make you sneeze. You could tell your body to fix itself so you healed faster, so you thought faster, so you reacted faster. You could tell your body to fix itself so you could breathe fire. Tony's contribution had been the customization. Maya said she had been building soldiers, but Tony had his own objectives.

And how did theory pass into application?

Maya came to Tony and said someone had _stolen her life's work,_ that some bad guy had _injected himself with her enhancile_ , and she had hugged Tony like she was relieved to see him. And Tony had said, _Of course I'll help you,_ and then promptly gotten the shit kicked out of him by the guy who had stolen Extremis in the first place. Maya came to Tony for help, and when Tony failed at helping, he shot himself up with Extremis, too. 

He'd all but begged her for it. Obsolescence was on the horizon: even after a solid month shut in his garage trying to coax faster reaction times out of the Iron Man, Tony had hit what might very well have been a final plateau. Maya had agreed, and while she was out of the room Tony introduced his own changes to the Extremis profile, and then he shot himself up and scabbed over and emerged two days later with all the wireless capabilities of a satellite. He wore the armor in his brain and his bones; they couldn't strip it without his consent. Tony Stark 2.0—not yet perfect, but one step closer to perfect than he'd been the day before.

In the process of kicking the shit out of the bad guy, he put all the pieces together. What do you do if you're running out of funding? You either convince your donors of the usefulness of your project, or you push harder to get results. Or, as Tony's mother would have said: why not both?

Maya had orchestrated every last movement. She'd staged the theft, passed the virus to a group of domestic terrorists, explained Extremis' capabilities in way exactly designed to catch Tony's attention. What better field-test than pitting an Extremis-enhanced enemy against Iron Man? How delighted she must have been when Tony failed and came to her door begging, how delighted she must have been to find herself with not only one but two test-subjects. Because who begged to dance on the other end of Maya's puppet string?

That's right. Tony Stark.

Ultimately, of course, Maya had been hauled off to the New York Women's Correctional Facility to serve twenty years. She hadn't been happy about it. Tony had heard she'd had to earn with good behavior the right to check out so much as a Stephen King book from the prison library. Meanwhile, Tony had touted Extremis as the key to the future, which resulted in one messy face-to-face conversation about ownership in which Tony did not come off looking the better. He didn't invent Extremis; he merely improved on it.

The quality that Maya has and Tony does not is conviction. Maya doesn't waste time building castles in the sky, Maya doesn't let fear guide her hand, Maya doesn't forego sleep because she wakes in the night paralyzed by doubt. Maya embraces who she is. She builds the future.

That's bullshit, of course. Tony has better reasons for not sleeping.

* * *

They land late in Omaha, and Tony makes two pit stops in the airport. The first is when he walks past a kiosk and spots a bluetooth headset out of the corner of his eye. Why is he wearing headphones? Did he forget, he's been forgetting—

He buys the headset, syncs it to his phone, tosses the crappy earbuds he'd stolen from Clint in the trash. Discarding the tether comforts him, and Friday's voice is clear in his head all the same.

The second stop is to down a hot cup of coffee and a burrito after Friday makes a pointed inquiry. It isn't his best idea; he hasn't eaten anything solid in months, but if his body's finally going to stop walking around, he's going to have coffee for his last meal. Some people weren't afforded that luxury, so Tony might as well enjoy it enough for both of them.

"Boss," Friday says softly.

Tony jerks.

"Sorry," he says, and he dumps his empty cup in a trashcan and goes to acquire a car. He leaves Eppley Airfield driving exactly the speed limit, which should get him to FuturePharm in an hour twenty. Friday keeps pace the whole way: "Left here," she says, and Tony will turn left, and then she goes back to whispering in his ear, keeping him alert, making sure he knows the layout of the lair of the beast. He doesn't believe in angels, but if he did, he'd believe in the angel of Fridays.

The final indignity is sneaking half a mile through a cornfield on foot in the dead of night. He trips more than once. If he had one of the Stephen King novels from Maya's prison library, maybe he'd have a better idea of what was coming for him; or maybe he'd just be able to name the thing that comes out of the dark before it eats him. This isn't how he thought he'd go. What's he even doing here? If the sun were out, he'd be able to pick out the bulk of the helicarrier where he left it parked six miles over Nebraska. Unless Danvers or some other, less principled power had moved it, although either case is equally useless to Tony. But maybe if he can—if he—

What _is_ he trying to accomplish?

Why does all of this seem so urgent?

Sometime in the past few days, Tony has lost operational efficiency. It's probably because he was stripped of his armor, which in one important way was the only thing keeping him upright. He doesn't even have the bright webbed overlay that used to paint his eyes and nerves, and maybe that's one more sign that this is the afterlife. All he knows is that someone has to stop Maya, and Tony gave away his armor and his authority, so now he has to clean up his own mess. It's fitting that he left the armor behind. The armor is dry, hard, clean; Tony is wet, soft, decomposing. The armor isn't messy. This is an organic problem. 

He's just so bare. The denotation is that he's open to suffering but the connotation is that someone has grasped his hair and tipped his head back so the bare line of his throat is laid shivering and sensitive before the teeth of the blind universe. Vulnerable is the watchword. 

The security on the building isn't even very good. He'd expected better of Maya, although with the kind of funding she was likely pulling out of her ass, she had the freedom to bury her attention in what she really cared about. Site security was for lesser mortals, and nobody could focus like Maya could focus. Her single-mindedness made Tony's engineering fugues look like well-tended gardens of emotional intelligence and social receptivity. 

"Boss?"

He's in the middle of an office block. If someone in that moment pinned him to the ground and stripped him of his clothes and made him walk back to New York, he couldn't feel more naked. If someone cracked his skull and dug their thumbs into the crevice and split his head open like an orange, he couldn't be more exposed.

"Boss," Friday says.

"Clear," Tony announces, and he eases himself around the next corner.

FuturePharm, for the most part, is unlit and unoccupied. There are a couple of security guards wandering around, but Tony's been dodging egomaniacs who are keen to impress upon him lessons about responsibility for most of his life. He's a pro, an old hand; it's the least of ways in which he prostitutes himself.

"Is this part of building yourself into a better man, Tony?" Steve wants to know.

Tony grits his teeth and keeps walking, although he wonders if Friday sees—if she had heard—

"The least you could do after killing me is do something decent with the life I gave you," Steve says. "You owe me that much." His voice is this low, soft, relentless thing that Tony can hear bearing down on him from behind. He could pick out that voice in a room of five thousand. 

"Isn't that right, Tony?" Steve says.

For a moment, Tony genuinely believes he's not going to acknowledge the question. He genuinely believes he has the strength to keep his eyes from straying to Steve. But Steve's patient; Steve knows him. If outwaiting Tony is the name of the game, Steve Rogers would wait until the end of the world.

It always works. Tony, in the end, is not a futurist but a defeatist.

"Yes," he mumbles.

"Yes," Steve repeats, rolling the sound around in his mouth as he savors his satisfaction. "Yes. That's right. But instead you're here. Is this what you deserve?"

"No," Tony says.

"No. Of course not." Tony thinks: god, he thinks: anything but this. He thinks: please, don't make me say it.

"What do you deserve, Tony?"

And, you know, what he wants and what he deserves have always been the same thing. At the root, that's the problem. He just wants it all to be over.

"Tony."

God, that voice is relentless. If Friday's talking to him, he'll never hear it over the slow tidal power of that voice. He can no more unhear that voice than a dog can unhear its master's command.

"Tony."

He'd give every dollar to his name in trade for the words to impress upon Steve why Tony can't yet have what he deserves. If he sits down right now in this hallway to wait to die because it's better than being Tony Stark for one more day, he isn't conceding to a point Steve never had to argue in the first place; he's abdicating responsibility. Steve may have believed that Tony deserved to die, but he believed in nothing so much as taking responsibility. That's what you do. You step up, you step forward. You volunteer to carry the weight. You get tough and chew grit and grow a spine. You take responsibility.

He's so tired. In the end, he just wants to be done, however little he deserves that escape.

"Tony," Steve says, and Tony begs: _"Can't you leave me alone?"_

The footsteps following him down the hall halt. Tony can feel the gravity of that great body pulling at him. His tidal-lock orbit was momentarily disturbed, but they both know he'll fall back into it—always facing Steve, unable to look away unless rattled by an event of catastrophic proportions.

He turns to face Steve, and finds Steve calm, wry, and amused.

"Tony," he says patiently, "I just thought you should know: the labs are the other way."

* * *

98732768123.10312.131.2  
PASSIVE MODE // Saved to Friday's Filodex 

HH: Hey, boss.

TS: Hey, Happy. What's the word?

HH: I read that article Pepper was towin' around by your gal. Dr. Hansen?

TS: She's definitely not my gal. Pretty brilliant, though.

HH: No kidding. She talked about some big stuff. Do you believe in all that?

TS: All what?

HH: All that… gene editing, and the Foresight Institute, and, what's it called, brain-machine—

TS: Brain-machine interfaces?

HH: Yeah. Brain-machine interface.

TS: There's two answers to that. Do I believe it's possible? Sure. We're already capable or on the cusp of capable of a lot of the things Maya mentioned.

HH: What's the other answer?

TS: Ah. Do I believe it's the right path? Absolutely. But with limitations. We have to figure out an ethical framework before we jump into the deep end and start building better people.

HH: You think that's possible? Better people?

TS: In the strictly biological sense, yeah. Maybe even in the behavioral sense, figuring out ways to be kinder to each other, but the first one's a little more clear-cut. When you can improve quality of life, when you can take steps to ensure survival of the species, when you can open doors of discovery that were previously shut… don't you have an obligation to do that?

HH: Kind of goes against what's natural.

TS: That depends on your definition of natural. It sounds arrogant, I know. The thing is, we're already moving in that direction whether we realize it or not. We might as well give it a name and try to keep a hand on the steering wheel.

HH: Make sure we're not accidentally running over someone else along the way.

TS: Or that we don't get left in the dust, exactly.

HH: I guess with all the other wild stuff that's going on now, the magic, all those guys from outer space… 

TS: Mutants and miracles.

HH: Right.

TS: The technology is there. Maya understands that. She sees what's coming.

* * *

Steve is with him when he emerges into Maya's cathedral, and Friday, too. If Tony were wearing a hat, he'd uncover his head, because that was what you did—you humbled yourself in the face of the divine. The ceiling may not soar and the walls may not be ringed with silent knighted sentinels, but Tony feels the same instinctive expansiveness that sparks from his own workshop.

There's no one here, per the cameras; he didn't want Friday interfacing with the network, because there's no telling what Maya considers reasonable security measures within her own domain. She guarded her work with all the brutal, artless ferocity of a junkyard dog. Tony, who once hunted like animals the men who stole his designs, can't fault her for it.

What surprises him is that she isn't here, but even Maya has to sleep sometimes. Does she sleep well? Are her nights haunted? How much or how little her conscience troubles her is a question Tony has never been able to answer. They shared the same streak of ruthless pragmatism, but deep down they both knew Maya saw him as a sentimental fool. Never let it be said that for her ideas she didn't take responsibility.

All he has to do is gather a little information and get out. Easy. Done. With enough evidence to construct a timeline he can convince—

The equipment is incredible. Where the hell did she get the funding? There's an atomic force microscope sitting in the midst of a blockade of other components, and it takes Tony a moment to figure out he's looking at a nanoscale 3D printer and another moment to realize it's more cutting-edge than any he's ever seen. God. Either her backers have deep pockets, or Maya has learned how to drag her head out of her single-minded pursuit long enough to think about malware. Although if she is stealing money, she's probably stealing it from Exxon-Mobile or Wal-Mart. Apple, maybe. Part of the reason Stark Industries is such a visible presence in consumer technology is Tony's insistance on fair labor standards, which means he hates Apple for both selfish and selfless reasons. He almost hopes she _is_ stealing money.

No one's in here with him except the two ghosts he carried in himself, but—

The room is cast in dim lighting. There are panels half-lit along the edges of the room, some screens still powered on. One of the workstations has a screensaver that's cycling through different types of pasta. The weirdest fucking people work in places like this; the weirdest, and the most brilliant. Once upon a time Tony cultivated those people, lured them from other companies, scooped them out of academia, gave them a haven when building better bombs got old. Now the only R&D he deals with is the Registration Division, and they stripped him of his armor and authority and left him naked and shivering. How is he supposed to come back from that? He can't even recognize his body anymore. It's as though he's still someone else, some separate thing that lives inside this skin and these bones and pilots it around like all his flesh is just one more suit of armor. 

Maybe he shouldn't have told them yes.

"Keep your head up," says Steve, who thus far has been relentlessly silent.

Tony doesn't have time to think about telling them yes. He doesn't have the capacity. Really, when you think about it, the height of selfishness is contemplating the nightmare he himself created when Maya's here, building a better world at the expense of the present. It's the height of arrogance. Under better conditions Tony can think at teraflop speeds, can problem-solve at petaflop speeds with all the parallel processes of a Cray computer, but he isn't thinking clearly, and because he isn't thinking clearly, he doesn't see Maya until she steps out of thin air in front of him. She has a star caught in her hand, and when she swings her fist at Tony's head, he goes down like a sack of bricks.

* * *

HH: You must run into that kinda thing a lot, huh. 

TS: Sure. Alien artifacts, super-soldier serums. A good old-fashioned burst of gamma radiation.

HH: But you think that even if we change like that, somethin' else makes us human?

TS: Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.

* * *

In retrospect, he should've seen this coming. In retrospect, he should see all things coming. His hindsight is perfect, the way he can pick out how he went wrong is perfect, but his foreknowledge is an imperfect thing. Fortunately, Tony Stark 3.0 is on the horizon, a being so well engineered nothing ever takes it by surprise.

Maya kicks him. He catches it in the ribs and the spine, rolls away from her next blow, and gets his feet under him. Happy taught him that—the importance of footwork.

"Boss?" Friday says, because of course she doesn't have eyes on the situation. She's caught in the phone in his pocket, anchored in a much more literal way. "Are you all right?"

When Maya grabs at him, he tries to duck; but she's fast, so impossibly fast, fast like Steve was fast, or maybe it's just that Tony's slow, that he's tired and old and the blows that feel like taps take him like a train wreck. She catches him by the hair and forces his head back until his back bows and his knees bend; the bare line of his throat is laid shivering and sensitive for her teeth. He can no longer remember his watchword.

"Boss," Friday says, low and urgent. He's blind, he's so blind, he's suddenly aware that more than the armor was taken from him: his vision is limited to two soft eyes, his knowledge to merely what he holds in his head. He can't come back from this—

Maya, desperate as always for recognition, rips Tony's communicator out of his ear. She takes part of the ear along with it. The pain hits him in a white-hot flash that eats away at his existence, that eats away at him even though part of an ear is nothing, certainly nothing that should hurt, absolutely nothing he should miss. 

When Maya lets go of the back of his head, he drops to the floor like a meteorite drops to the Earth: hard, fast, with commitment and feeling. He lives here now. Might as well get used to it.

"You figured it out faster than I thought you would," Maya says. All he can see of her is her feet—practical boots, what Carol might call shitkickers. She leans over him, he can tell by the way the bottom fringe of her hair sweeps over his neck, and then she shoves a hand into his pocket and pulls out Friday. Pulls out his phone. Pulls out his last benevolent ghost.

"You won't need this," she adds, which is followed by a crack that Tony understands as his lifeline breaking. He hurts. Everything hurts. How did she hit him so hard? Maya's on the tall side of average for a woman, but she has the whipcord build of someone often too absorbed to eat and more likely to drink her calories when she remembers she's hungry. "It strikes me as notably short-sighted that you apparently came here alone." She crouches down, takes him by the chin. She forces him to look. "Without the armor." The blood from his ear is running into his eyes. "How arrogant of you. What did you ever hope to accomplish?"

Tony swallows down his bile. He doesn't have an answer for her. This whole headlong rush—he hasn't been thinking _clearly,_ and there's no hope against Maya if he can't think. Were he to pick a time to lie down and wait to die, surely it would resemble this. 

Really the only thing left to him is curiosity. Tony's made miracles out of worse.

"How'd you get out?" 

"Of prison?" She takes her hand away from his chin. That's good, it was already too much contact, it was already more than Tony can take although he wears this body like armor, within it but separate from it. "I did what you would do, Tony. I cut a deal."

With a monstrous expenditure of effort, Tony sits up. He is aware that he only sits up because Maya lets him. He's aware, and she's aware, and aren't they both just so damn smart? 

She waits for him to catch his breath and wipe the blood from his face, and then, sounding amused, she says, "Go ahead and ask."

"You're using metahumans as test subjects to refine Extremis."

"That's you telling me what you know, not asking me what I know." Her long hair is pulled back in a tail that falls over her shoulder, her face is free of makeup, and her gaze is filled with the crystalline clarity known only to saints. She isn't a martyr; this is her own design. "But sure, Tony—keep going."

"The survival rate with metahumans is higher." God, he can't _think_. He just wants to close his eyes. "And…" Oh. God, of course. "You want to learn how to replicate their powers."

"Very good," she says, paternal and Socratic, "although of course I tested on baseline humans, too. The real question, though, is: by what means did I achieve all these ends?" His blankness must translate to his expression, because she smirks. "Do you really not know? We serve the same masters."

No.

"Is it that much of a surprise? I sold it as a super-soldier enhancile. Those are the magic words—the DOD fell over themselves to break me out and give me money." Her eyes drift to somewhere over his left shoulder. "I wonder what Steve Rogers would think of that."

"Go to hell," Tony says.

"You know what your problem is?" She reconsiders. "Well. You know what one of your problems is? You sold out. I remember when you were original. Now you're just treading water." 

"You think you're building a better future, Maya?"

"I know I am," she answers.

"And this is the way to do it?" There's a whistling sound; he can't tell where it's coming from, can't tell if it tinnitus or some part of his suit that's been breached. "Can't perform with no audience, Maya, and we're both performers if nothing else."

"Is that supposed to hurt me?" She settles back on her haunches. "Let me lay it out for you, since apparently you're too impaired to figure it out yourself." She knocks the back of her hand against the gold cuff that sits like a tourniquet around his ankle and says, "I cut a deal with the DOD, and they gave me a lot of money and very little oversight, and I exploited the opportunity with extreme prejudice. And you know what I made, Tony? Do you know what I built with my own two hands?"

"What," he says, because that's his line; he's been on the other side of the stage often enough to know.

"I built my panacea," Maya says. "The first release is ready to go. It's airborne, deliverable by warhead. In a couple of minutes, nobody on the Eastern seaboard will ever have to worry about dementia again." At his panic, she grins. "Just a little bit behind, aren't you? Then again, you always are."

"You aren't going to get away with this," he says, even though he doesn't believe it.

"Don't waste our time with platitudes. I already have." Tony recognizes that beatific look she's wearing. She's saving them all from human weakness. Maya Hansen 3.0—unfettered and unchained, cutting a ruthless line from what is to what will be. "And do you want to know the best part, Tony?" She leans a little closer. "All those test subjects? I found them through _your_ registry. I didn't hack it. I didn't steal the information." Her breath whispers against where his ear should be, and she says: "It was legal, and _you signed off on it."_

No.

"Yes," Maya says. "A database of every metahuman in the country who so much as helped an old lady cross the street. Names, addresses, abilities. I said I needed access, and they handed over the keys."

No.

"I did enjoy cutting you off, too—don't mistake me." This time, when her hand falls to his ankle, it stays there. "When they said they were concerned about you, that they needed to contain you, I stepped up to serve my country."

"You can't," Tony says.

"I did."

"It isn't. You can't—the changes the enhancile made, that's my body. You can't shut off part of my body."

"Neurologically speaking, I think you'll find I can," Maya says. "Beyond that, I'm not going to tell you how that anklet works. You've stolen enough of my secrets."

No.

"You won't believe me when I say this, but I will miss you." Her face softens, her eyes soften; the crease of her mouth goes lax. "You're brilliant, Tony. You were my friend. For a long time, you were my friend; and I don't have friends. But this is my legacy, and that's worth more to me than you. It's worth everything."

"You're going to kill me."

"I'm burning down this building. I have what I need. No point in leaving evidence." She shrugs. "The charges are already set, and you—at this point, Tony, you're a shell. You're just evidence."

Okay. Tony can live with that; or rather, Tony can die with that.

"What's the survival rate?" he grinds out.

"Fortunately, I no longer need legitimacy. I have a network and resources of my own. You might recall what that's like."

"What's the survival rate, Maya?"

Her fingers creep over the curve of the cuff and trace its edges against his skin. It's the first time in recent memory someone has touched him gently. He used to love her; she used to be family. The worst part is that he still recognizes her—still recognizes himself in her.

"Thirty-seven percent," she says, satisfied, and then she stands. "When you think about it, we're both getting what we deserve." She halts there for a moment, looking down at him, and her mouth holds a snarl or a smile or a sneer. "It was good knowing you, Tony," she says, and then she adds, "You can fuck off now." And she takes her own advice and fucks off, with even measured steps in her shitkicker boots and dress slacks and lab coat. Maya Hansen: multifaceted, a master of practicalities. Tony's going to die, and he didn't even get the good exit line.

* * *

They used to kick back and listen to music on the rare occasions they both had a free evening and _Grey's Anatomy_ wasn't on. (Steve was enamored with Sandra Oh. Tony was enamored with Steve's enamoration.) Sometimes Steve would sketch, or Tony would work, or one or both of them would read. Most of the time, though, they talked; there was nothing Tony could imagine that was as good as talking with Steve. They hashed out problems, picked apart their performance, inevitably they talked about the Avengers. More often, though, they let the conversation meander through whichever subjects came to mind. Tony told Steve about all the many accounts written about the Round Table, and Steve told Tony how L. Ron Hubbard wrote so fast he typed on rolls of butcher paper, and then Tony would badger Steve about his refusal to watch a certain documentary on Scientology, and then Steve would mention that he and Arnie had once spent an entire winter eating at a Catholic soup kitchen, which was really his way of asking if Tony would warm up some leftovers because he, Steve, burned about four million calories a day but preferred being fed to feeding himself. If Tony didn't indulge him, he would inevitably stoop to talking about all the potatoes the Army had made him peel. It might very well have been a ruse; Steve was a competent cook, but Tony didn't mind taking care of him.

One evening in late fall they'd been listening to Leonard Cohen while waiting for some cider to heat, and Steve had stopped with his head cocked to listen. "Oh," he'd said, and Tony had understood and felt echoed in his bones the familiarity of it. The lyric stayed with him: _Baby, I've been here before; I've seen this room, I've walked this floor._ His whole life reduced to two neat lines; how was that fair? Tony was a futurist, but sometimes it felt like he chased the future less than he was chased by it.

* * *

He builds a symphony of justification. The second movement goes like this:

In 1945 Steve Rogers, through a combination of factors that made lightning strikes look common, was lifted outside of time. Some decades later, he was pulled from his rest and made to resume living in a world of linear cause and effect. Tony can't imagine the shock of that, can't imagine how badly Steve must have wanted to return to sleep. When he'd passed, it only seemed fair to return him to the one place he'd known peace.

No, that's not right; he's lost the melody.

Steve used to joke about it; things got rough, he asked if someone had an eight-foot block of ice he could crawl into. He was joking, but the joke was about escape. Tony, who often joked about escapes, wondered if some part of Steve meant it, if he missed that cool remote place, missed the armor of the ice. Steve was probably joking, but Tony didn't want to bet on his ability to read Steve.

The tempo's off. Better try again—

The super-soldier serum was the holy grail, and men would lay down their lives in pursuit of it. The one successful application was six feet two inches and two hundred twenty pounds of all-American ass-kicking; he might look like a nice boy, but that didn't mean he was one. Good luck getting a blood sample out of _that_. Dead, though, he was an almost irresistible attraction—that whole corpse, all his ticking parts ready to be disassembled and laid bare. Someone had to take responsibility, had to make sure Steve wasn't punished for the sin of perfection.

No. He's out of tune.

Out of the water they drew him, a hero from a bygone age, clad in mail and armed with a gleaming shield. _Here lies Arthur, the once and future king._ He woke up once to save them; there was nothing to say he wouldn't wake again, should need be great and hope spread thin.

That's closer, although he could work on his phrasing.

The worst quality of Tony's, the part he tried desperately to cut out, was that he wanted to be special in Steve's eyes. He had no right to be jealous, to think he had any right to Steve's time or Steve's attention or Steve's regard, knew that he was fortunate to have Steve's friendship full-stop. But he wanted that last moment kept private, not shared with two and a half million people. God, that was selfish.

Now he's speeding up—

Steve was haunting him, not in his dreams because Tony didn't sleep but in his waking hours. He would look out at the world and see nothing but a blue-eyed boy looking back, and he knew, he _knew,_ but what if the only way to lay Steve to rest—

Christ, Tony. Take some goddamn responsibility.

Steve was haunting him, not in his dreams but in his waking hours. He looked out at the world and saw nothing but a blue-eyed boy looking back, and he knew, he _knew,_ that the only way to make sure Steve would stop haunting him was to lock him in a box and drop him in the middle of the ocean. Tony wasn't foolish enough to believe that would cut the chain, but he thought: maybe. Maybe.

"You don't matter," Steve says.

"I know that," Tony says. "Can't you say something useful?"

Steve's crouched in front of him, echoing Maya's earlier posture. Why couldn't he be haunted by Happy? He's been quietly, faithfully, desperately in love with Steve for years, but sometimes Steve is an asshole.

"I told you the labs were down here."

"Yeah, that was really helpful." Every part of him aches. He has sand in his eye sockets, blood smeared on the side of his face. People keep cracking his suits and dragging him out into the bright air.

He's going to die here. Does it matter? Does he care?

"You don't have much time," Steve reminds him. Tony half-expects to see the shield strapped to his back, although of course the shield's in better hands; Steve wanted someone else to have it, and Tony could execute that one last thing for Steve.

There's really only one bottom line. If he's going to die, he might as well take this last sacrament. 

"Do you know," he says, "how many ways I've tried to fall out of love with you?"

"The best part of you is loving me," Steve says.

"It's the worst part," Tony counters. "I've tried to cut it out, code it out, trick myself out of it. I can't excise it. It doesn't ebb, it won't be replaced. It's the worst part of me, Steve."

"Got a funny way of showing it, Shellhead." Steve pats Tony's ankle. "Now you're always going to be the man who murdered Captain America."

"I know."

"Do you?" Steve rocks back. You could cut glass on his jaw. Tony's always been hard-pressed to name a favorite feature, but that jaw—the straight strong line cutting into the jut of his chin, the notch at the corner, the crook leading to the soft skin of his throat. Tony had more than once caught himself physically listing towards Steve to press his face there. What stopped him was the knowledge that Steve would recoil. He'd be _nice_ about it, but the damage couldn't be forgotten, couldn't be unlearned. Tony couldn't expose himself like that. Stark men knew better.

He looks at Steve. Steve looks back.

"Maybe you do," Steve says. "Always with the crystal ball, never with the mirror. You don't have much time left, Tony. How are you going to use it?"

A kingdom for his armor, that's how Tony wants to use it. Not this armor, this armor that Maya breached, this wet sack of armor that Tony wears like a suit; he wants his real armor, the dry hard strong armor, the shell that made him better. Now he's missing half an ear. That's why he got rid of ears on his real body. You never knew when someone was going to tear one off.

Steve has something in his hand. Tony can't quite tell what it is—

Extremis could fix his ear. Maya had shut off his ability to heal rapidly, too, or else he wouldn't be bleeding, wouldn't be hearing that sucking whistle every time he breathed. He'd given himself the heart of a super-soldier, but apparently the heart of a super-soldier wasn't all that resilient. 

If these are his last rites, he can think of worse ways to go. At least he gets to talk with Steve; he can't think of anything better than talking with Steve. Steve won't go away no matter how many ways Tony's tried to drive him out. He won't leave Tony alone, because Tony doesn't really want to be left alone. If the only way he can have Steve is to let his mind be haunted, then he'll throw open the doors and invite the specter in.

This is Iron Man sacrificing himself to Captain America. He's at the altar now. He might as well sit down here and wait to die; it's a hell of a lot better than being Tony Stark for one more day.

"That's enough self-pity," Steve says, and when he raps the thing he's holding in his hand against the cuff on Tony's ankle, the sound cuts through the cathedral like a bell. "You're running out of time."

"You said I don't matter."

"Sure, Tony," Steve says. "You might not matter, but they do. Sixty-three percent. Seems to me like you ought to step up and take responsibility."

Maya. _What's the survival rate?_

Maya can fuck off.

Steve taps his tool against the cuff. Extremis was a tool; Maya had given him Extremis, and Extremis could fix this. All those parts of his body that Maya's locked away—

He looks again at the tool in Steve's hand and sees that it's a laser cutter. How had he missed that before?

"Okay," he says. "Okay."

The articulation of movement as he sits up is transcendent; a hundred thousand processes and a hundred thousand seconds go into merely dragging his constituent parts together, bracing a forearm against his stomach, and leaning forward. "We're running out of time," Steve reminds him, but he lets Tony take the laser cutter from his hand. 

He can't get the angle right, so he tugs up his pantleg and assesses the geometry again. In a few minutes, Maya's going to trigger a missile attack on the East Coast. His saving grace would be that he's safe in the Midwest, removed from Atlantic affairs no matter how anchored he might be, but in this What Is he'll die anyway thanks to Maya's taste for immolation.

"I'm going to flinch," he tells Steve.

"Then don't flinch."

"It isn't that easy for me." The cutter's heavy in his hand. He tells Steve, "It isn't that easy for me. You're going to have to hold me down."

"Anything for you, Tony," Steve says, and then his big hands touch Tony's leg: one braced just above his ankle, the other around his toes. At least if he's going to die, he gets to die with Steve touching him.

"Deep breath," he tells himself, and then he presses the laser cutter up against his Achilles tendon, angles the handle downward, and actives it. His heel severs neatly, a diagonal bisection that causes his calcaneus to drop off and fall to the floor. The cuff drags on the open wound as Steve guides it over his foot. It's a good thing he's wearing his armor, or that would've hurt.

* * *

And, you know, in the end, maybe it's a good thing he's anchored: the sensory input overwhelms him like a tidal wave, washing over him so hard and fast that the sky is gone before he can take one last look. He can't swim against that wave; all he can do is make himself so open that it rushes through him instead of rushing him away.

He's running out of time.

Tony isn't a neurologist, a bio-engineer, he isn't Maya Hansen. He's loathe to admit how little he knows about what Extremis did to him, but the truth is that there isn't any shame in admitting what you don't know. That's what people tell him. Tony can admit when he's wrong, but he can't admit that he's wrong without a thick cloud of shame fogging his head. He doesn't know exactly how Extremis restructured him. He doesn't know how his brain works. He doesn't know how to get out of his own head; so it's a miracle that he manages to aggregate enough information to reach out through a satellite and divert the warheads to disperse their payloads harmlessly into space. The last thing he remembers is being hit by a wall of force. It feels like a star exploding.

* * *

Carol's voice: "You know why you're an idiot, Tony?" He comes around just enough to realize that she's cradling him in a bridal carry. "You left a helicarrier full of your people parked six miles above Omaha. What the hell made you think we wouldn't help?"

* * *

When he fights his way back to consciousness, he wishes he could say he's lit up with a moment of clarity. His body is lit up, the ear renewed, the heel intact; it's the first thing he checks, and seeing the smooth bag of his skin stretched over the architecture of his foot makes his vision swim. Cutting off his heel feels like a dream, like something he'd done so casually it amounted to nothing more than removing one module of his armor before replacing it with another.

His chest is whole, no bone-punch circle; his fingers are here; his face is fine. The nightstand beside his hospital bed holds an earpiece and a glass of water. When he reaches for the glass of water, his hands are shaking, which is a reaction he thought he'd coded out of himself. Tony Stark 3.0 may be close, but he's not here yet.

He picks up the earpiece and carefully fits it over the ear that wasn't ripped off. The cartilage feels like tissue paper under his thick, deadened fingers.

"Hey, boss," Friday says, and he can almost hear the echo of another voice in that greeting. "Didn't see that one coming, did we?"

"Lies, damn lies, and statistics," Tony agrees.

"Dr. Hansen's missiles were successfully diverted. FuturePharm exploded, but not before Colonel Danvers staged a very dashin' rescue. Zero casualties."

"I gathered," Tony says. It occurs to him that he doesn't actually need the earpiece to talk to Friday anymore, but he leaves it on anyway. His brain feels like one big bruise. Apparently an Extremis-driven healing ability has its limits. So much for superior Stark wetware.

"Is Carol around?" he asks.

"She's in California."

"Where are we?"

"D.C."

"Fantastic." The corners of the room are intrusively empty. No one's standing just over his shoulder, either, although he still feels the weight of a titanic regard nonetheless. What he wants, what he really wants, is to turn himself off and sink back into a bed, not because he's been rendered unconscious but because he chooses to shut his eyes and sleep. He even knows which bed he'd pick; that's an easy What If, simple enough for Tony to construct even though his mind is pulled apart like taffy. Good thing he doesn't need to sleep anymore.

Maybe there's a solution here. Balance has never been Tony's strongest suit.

"Do I need to talk to any doctors?" 

"Not much they can do for you that you can't do for yourself," Friday says. "Jack Kooning wants to meet as soon as you're able. He's waiting in one of the hospital meeting rooms. I took the liberty of having a suit sent over."

"Which kind?"

"The kind you're legally entitled to wear." A pause. "Colonel Rhodes called. He wanted to know how you're doin'."

Tony swings his feet over the side of the bed and flinches when the soles of his feet touch the bare floor. He withdraws, recalculates, and gingerly lowers them again. The strangest part of this is how little he hurts; it's all smoothed over, regrown, not really even worth mentioning. Like it didn't even happen. Like Tony didn't cut part of his foot off. If he weren't so tired, he would be enthralled by the suggestion he could remake himself into something perfect. Pain may be the only currency the universe understands, but everyone knows Tony Stark is richer than god.

"You don't have to be my secretary," he says.

"As long we both remember that. Should I send a response?"

"Yeah," Tony says, and he opens the closet door with hands that are still trembling. No shared rooms with fluorescent lights for _him._ "Tell Rhodey..."

"That you're fine?"

"Tell him thanks for asking," he says. "And send Carol a bouquet of flowers. No, hold on—get her some Red Sox tickets. Best seats available for the rest of the postseason."

"Done."

Tony considers the suit. It won't be much protection, but the fabric is a special weave that came right out of SIR&D. At least he won't be naked. 

He stands there, caught in the sight of it, and then he very gently reaches up and touches his earpiece.

"Thank you, Friday," he says, and the ghost in his ear whispers back: "You're welcome."

Jack's waiting down the hall. He turns around when Tony enters the room. "Tony. Thought you were someone else for a minute there. Come on, come in. Feeling better?"

"No," Tony says.

"You were pretty banged up. Get you something to drink? They dug up a pot of coffee for me. Just instant, but it's hot."

"Sure," Tony says, and he takes a seat and watches as the Secretary of Defense pours him a drink.

Jack stays standing, shoves a hand in one pockets, picks up his own mug of coffee, and clears his throat. "Well. It looks like we owe you an apology." Translation: we accidentally hired a monster who misused our funds, our personnel, and our equipment. "We were worried that… but you were on to something, with those cornfield murders. Good bit of detective work. Of course, we'd expect nothing less."

"Of course," Tony's mouth says. He'd never really appreciated his feet before this. If Stark Industries isn't already investigating luxury socks, they certainly will be by tomorrow.

"You're being reinstated. And we're returning your armor." Jack looks down at his coffee. They were friends, once, just like Tony and Maya were friends, but now Tony wonders if he ever really knew Jack Kooning at all. "We— _I_ —would like to keep you as Director of SHIELD for as long as possible." Translation: I'm going to bring you back into the fold, which means if you screw up, my head's on the chopping block. Maybe he and Jack really are friends; or maybe Tony's definition of friend involves business deals and golf courses. Maya wouldn't golf, but Happy would have.

"Okay," Tony says, and then after too long a pause, he adds, "Thank you," because it seems like what he's supposed to say.

"We'll have a better support staff for you, too. More people on your level, people who you can delegate to." The door swings open; Jack looks up. "There we go," he says, "here's one of those people now."

Tony builds a symphony of justification. The third movement goes like this:

Senator John Boynton (D-NY) introduced the Superhuman Registration Act to the 109th U.S. Congress. It passed through both the House and Senate with unprecedented speed, and the president signed the bill into law in the early days of summer. Mere hours after it passed, Steve Rogers, in one of his usual iconic displays, announced his decision to resist Registration and go underground. Neither the announcement nor the resistance were peaceful. 

Senator Boynton's principal sin was in introducing the Registration Act; his subordinate sins contained the usual litany of greed and moral pliability. In the interest of national security, Tony had contacted the man who was both Senator Boynton's primary donor and the keeper of his secrets and leveraged that into a deal that resulted in Senator Boynton being removed from office and arrested. Tony may have murdered Captain America, but in at least one way John Boynton was an architect of his misery. In removing Boynton, Tony vindicated Steve—

No. He took revenge for Steve—

No. He did this for Steve—

No. Take some goddamn responsibility, Tony.

He ruined Boynton to make himself _feel better._ He shook hands with the devil so he could sleep at night; and now here the devil is, walking through the door, educated and erudite and genial and with all the serpentine intent in the world behind his eyes.

"Tony," Norman Osborn says, "I look forward to working with you. We're going to do some great things together."

* * *

Only one copy of the footage exists. In it, Tony enters the room, sits down, takes off his helmet, and cradles it in his hands. He spends twenty-seven minutes staring into the blank eyes of the Iron Man. He spends the minute after that sniveling, and the minute after that standing. Once upright, he leans over the body on the table and tells it one thing before replacing his helmet and exiting. The whole affair takes slightly less than half an hour. Friday has the only recording.

* * *

"You saw this coming, didn't you?"

Tony's in New York, a temporary retreat to lick his wounds. It's a moot exercise. Really he just needs a moment in the one place where he feels most like himself.

"Saw what coming?" he asks.

Friday's wearing a long red cloak and a pointed hat spangled with stars—a world away from Tony's bathrobe. When her projection hops up on the worktable beside him and crosses her legs, her cloak falls open to reveal a sleek dress that's more _Bell, Book, and Candle_ than _The Sorcerer's Apprentice_.

"The SRA," she says. "The conflict. This split. You knew Troy was about to burn."

"I… thought this or something like it was likely." He kicks his feet out, enjoying that he has two of them and that both are whole and intact; it's a bad idea to wander around down here without shoes, but Tony lives to walk on the wild side. The rest of his body is locked away in a box; you can do that with your armor if it's sophisticated enough. Thanks to Extremis, his connection to all those modular parts remains seamless although they no longer touch him. 

"You had a handle on the pieces in play too quickly to have been caught off-guard."

"Are you kidding?" Tony settles his elbow on the arm of his chair and props his chin in his hand. "I was caught off-guard every day. If I'd forecasted this correctly, it wouldn't have happened at all."

"Even you can't control everything, boss," Friday says, a blithe dark spirit. She holds all his secrets. He hopes he keeps hers as well as she keeps his. "All those revisions came too quickly from too many different quarters to have been effected after the fact, though. You were plantin' seeds in senators' ears."

"Yeah, well, that was just… predictive damage control. Look at all the decisions that came back to bite me in the ass. I didn't anticipate the important parts." He pauses, lets the name fill his mouth; when was the last time he'd said it to another living person? "I didn't anticipate Steve."

"That he would resist?"

"That he wouldn't listen to me at all."

Friday lets him sit with that thought. She must know how it haunts him. He should've approached Steve earlier (why would Steve pay any special attention whatsoever to the garbage that came out of Tony's mouth?), he should've tried harder to get through to Steve (if he'd tried any harder, Steve would have split open his skull), he should have—should have stopped making excuses, should have taken—

"Someone could make an argument that what you do isn't science but magic." At his sharp look, Friday shrugs. "Just sayin'."

"Engineering always looks opaque from the outside. Clark's third law."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Friday recites. "Not that, though. The divination. Prophecy. Foreknowledge obtained by some black art." Part of Friday will always be the precocious, dramatic brat whose birth took Tony's life by storm. Her childhood was short, as her nature as a synthetic being dictated, but for all her youthful hellfire he sometimes wished it had lasted longer.

"Are you saying I should be burned at the stake?"

Her lips twitch; they're always mutually delighted when they play along. "Leviticus said witches should be stoned, actually, but there's a play—"

"My mother knew Arthur Miller." This conversation is starting to wander.

"Right. There's a character named Giles Corey, being tortured to force him to confess to witchcraft—you remember?"

"Yes, Friday, I remember."

"They kill him by pressing. Put a board over his chest and pile stones on it until he breaks or dies. But you know what he said, every time they asked him to admit guilt?"

Tony knows, but he's going to let her say it anyway; god knows she's offered him the same indulgence enough times.

"More weight," he says.

"More weight," she agrees. "Every time they asked him the question that could save his life, he refused to speak except to ask for more weight." She pauses. "It's somethin' to think about."

"I'm not thinking clearly." The admission costs him; he couldn't have confessed to anyone other than his holy ghost. 

Friday tilts her head and considers. "Post-Extremis, you don't process the same way you did before. Makes sense that there's some glitches when you're thinkin' through new neural pathways."

"Maybe," Tony says. It's the most rational explanation, disregarding his current physical deprivation. He appreciates Friday's willingness to play along, if nothing else. "Are we ready to go?"

"Sure you want to pull the trigger, boss?"

"With the situation as it stands, I don't see any other choice."

"You'll just have the one backup. They're going to figure it out eventually."

"Gotta work with what we have. Do it."

Friday's eyes fall shut. Sometimes it's impossible to remember she doesn't see through them. After a moment they open again, still the most translucent blue he's ever seen.

"Done," she says. "No more Registry. There's a reasonable facsimile in its place, but it won't hold forever."

"That's okay," Tony says. "We both knew this wasn't going to last."

"Maybe not, but you're givin' it a good effort all the same." It's nice that someone thinks so. "What now?" she asks.

Tony considers the sand in his eyes. He considers that unlike Igraine, he can always return to Tintagel. Friday has her own pursuits to keep her busy here in this cathedral, and the rest of the world is locked safely outside; Tony can follow his chain. 

He pilots his body to the top of the tower and lets himself into Steve's room.

He crawls into bed.

He falls asleep.

And he dreams.

* * *

Here's one dream: _"Go to sleep, Tony," Steve says. "I'll be here when you wake up."_

* * *


End file.
